BIOL201 (Microbiology) Help, Ivy Tech Lawrence campus

We may be in the same class This is a tough class, I wish we had either an open lab or at the least, an extra test prep session! What day/night is your class? I am going on t/th.

I am taking the online version of this class and was just told that my 80 on our first test was a very good score. The test was very very difficult.

Kristina, I hope you did well on the test! I have it this evening Hopefully after this first test we will learn how to deal with the essay format. We were told the same thing about the scores, 70-80 range.. OOF It's going to be a tough one!

Kristina,
I am in the same lecture class. I normally sit on second row on the rightside, usually at the very end of the table. Yeah, I was freaking out too when I heard her say the average of the exams. I felt ok about today's test though. I studied all last week and over the weekend. Hope I explained things well enough on those essay questions. Hope we both did well! What did you think of the test? I didn't think it was as bad as I was expecting.

I didn't think it was too bad either, I would even say that I like the essay format better! Answering the questions and telling what is known, instead of just picking an "appropriate" answer is more telling. I was unable to adequately answer couple of question and will lose points, but I know that I didn't know that part of the material well enough. Seems fair to me

Instead of focusing on the details, I am going to work harder on learning the concepts. What do you guys think?

I took BIOL 211 at Ivy Tech this past summer. Though it's hard to give advice about how best to study since everyone learns differently, I can tell you what worked best for me. First of all, I think it is extremely important to go to every class. I downloaded the PowerPoint presentations before class and used my laptop to type my lecture notes at the bottom of each page of the PowerPoint presentation. One of the benefits of attending lectures in class (versus online) is the teacher will tell you they are emphasizing only some parts of the chapters, and will occasionally skip slides or subjects altogether. Also, I write all the strange little things the teacher says. Sometimes you think it may sound silly, but at times it can help you remember something when you're taking an exam.

You can also use the lecture slides and presentation to gauge how much detail you need to know about specific questions.

The first test was the easiest. My class received a handout on the first day of the semester with key terms and objectives on it. Before each test I made sure that I could answer all of the objectives. I didn't bother with the terms (there were so many of them for some of the chapters it seemed overwhelming; in addition, I'm generally pretty good at recalling definitions and facts). It will be helpful to make sure you know the key terms for the matching, and on our second exam, a couple of the essay questions came straight from the objectives. In general, the tests all covered the same topics as the objectives, so if you could answer those questions, you did fine on the exam. I found it helpful to answer the questions in outline or list form, or in a table. This is helpful when learning processes, like aerobic respiration, how a virus enters a cell, or inflammation, and it's also helpful for organizing more complex or intricate subjects like innate and adaptive immunity.

Like the objectives, a couple of our test questions also came straight from the homework.

Though the tests never contained anything that wasn't covered in the lecture slides, I found it extremely beneficial to read every chapter in the textbook. You'll notice that certain things aren't covered and you can easily skip them, but for the rest of the material, it clarified things for me that seemed kind of disjointed in the PowerPoint slides. Reading the book was especially helpful to me for the third exam, which was the first exam we had that covered diseases. The lecture slides didn't follow a consistent format when presenting the diseases (there are certain things you're asked to remember, such as the Genus species, the portal of entry, the pathology, etc., and these are listed in a different order for each disease--sometimes different sets of information are presented for each disease. Unless they've updated the slides you'll know what I mean when you get to that point.)

So, to summarize:
1. Attend lecture
2. Take good notes
3. Answer the objectives (and key terms if you need to)
4. Read the textbook when you don't understand something

The format of our class might have been slightly different because it was 8 weeks long versus 16 weeks, but hopefully this will help someone.