Just wanting to know but whats the best book for bio? new century, dot points, in focus or excel?
Hi!!
For note-taking, I used both
Pearson and
In Focus but, I much preferred the layout of
In Focus compared to
Pearson. I am not sure how your school works, but some teachers may prefer a particular textbook and create study material based on it. So also keep that in mind.
ALSO, it is important to cross-check between multiple textbooks and your teacher to ensure information is reliable.
Dot points was very useful to me for revising basic knowledge of the biology syllabus which helped me a lot with my first few assessments. It also had very detailed solutions to each question with was also very useful.
Excel was my most used textbook for practise questions and I redid this textbook many times prior to the exam. It contains questions from past HSC syllabus, without having to actually go through every past paper to find questions. But, the new HSC exam did contain more skill-based questions compared to the theory which this textbook was mainly composed of. However, I still think it was beneficial to use it to gain more confidence in answering theory-based questions
Keep in mind that these are just from personal experience. I would highly urge you to experiment with different textbooks to see which one is suited for you. By the way, I haven't heard of New Century before so I'm not sure about that.
JUST A GENERAL TIP
I see that you are doing your HSC in 2021, I would honestly recommend you experimenting with different study techniques in Year 11 to make sure you enter Year 12 studying efficiently and correctly. Looking back, I felt like I took Preliminary a little TOO seriously and because of that, I had to use my HSC year, figuring out what worked best for me. I know, you may not believe it when people say Year 11 "doesn't" matter (i didn't too) but remember that it does not go towards your ATAR. I am not saying to completely slack off but use your time wisely before entering a year where "everything will count".
Anyways, I am very sorry for such a long response. I just want to provide advice to the new syllabus which I didn't get when I was going through my HSC. I wish you Good Luck with your studies and hope my advice was helpful!!
