azn_gangsta81 said:
oh survivor, just another question....would it be sufficient if we just memorise the answers and other stuff in our prac manuals, or do we need to do more, ie background reading in order to do reasonably well in the prac exam?
any more tips you can give us
kindly appreciated
It's fine just know everything in the manual. But just know it well. Some of the questions you can't really study for anyway. For example, they will put a pin in an organ of a dissected rat/toad and it will ask you "What is the Function of this organ?", and questions like that. You bascially you need to know the dissected rat really well (obviously you need to draw well to have any chance in the first place), then correlate this structure to the function. If you don't know the organ you're screwed; if you know the organ but don't know the function, you're screwed as well. Sometimes your rat may be different from the dissected rat in the prac test and it's hard to identify the structure/function. But nothing you can do there except to give an educated guess.
For the classification stuff, you must know "how to classify", not just know every plants you've seen in the lab. They are testing you to see whether you can APPLY the concepts you have learned to a "new" situation. They are NOT testing you whether you can memorise this plant has this classification, they want you to know how to do it by looking at any plant (e.g. how do you know its a monocot/dicot, why have you classified this leaf with this structure?).
There are 2-3 questions that requires looking at a microscope, e.g. classification of epithelia, name sturcture of the eye (i.e. receptors) and function, and plants.
Finally, strange questions include looking at a picture of an organism and know the transition period through the evolutionary pathway.
I hope this helps.
