A simple trick to avoid ‘silly’ mistakes by stopping your brain getting ahead of itself

Can an AI act as a teacher/tutor? Can it act as as a GOOD teacher/tutor?? Well … maybe, if you’re smart about it. Here’s my thinking and suggested prompt.

Can an AI help you revise topics you’ve already learned once? Yes - but only if you can stop it from telling you everything before you’ve had a chance to think. This is how I designed a prompt to achieve that.

Every year students spend months on the personal statement. But for most medical schools there is little or no point. Most schools do not use personal statements to decide who gets an interview, and some don’t even read them.

This doesn’t mean personal statements don’t matter at all - three schools score the for shortlisting. It just means it’s worth checking your chosen schools’ requirements before spending a lot of time on them.

Never just open up the AI and ask it a question without any context. You need to be smarter about this. Think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Use this free tool to check yourself against the entry criteria of all 41 UK Medical Schools. Find out which are worth your UCAS choices.

Every year I watch capable students throw away one or two of their four medicine choices on schools that were never going to interview them. Not because their grades were weak, but because nobody had told them that Imperial ignores GCSEs entirely, or that Birmingham weights them at almost half the decision, or that a UCAT score which comfortably clears one school's bar falls below another's published floor.

If you were disappointed by your Year-12 exam results, you’re not alone. Many A-level Biology students have a bit of a shock at this point, but you still have the opportunity to turn things around.

Reading pop-science books is enjoyable and also supports your studies. Here are eight books that I recommend, all of which are written to be interesting and entertaining for non-specialists. They bring biology to life and will change the way you think about these topics forever.

Why do some students excel while others struggle? There are factors far beyond the idea that ‘they are smarter’. Learn how to approach A-level Biology like a top-grade student and boost your grades.

We provide a wide selection of self-marking, multiple-choice quizzes by topic for OCR A and CIE. But how can you use them to best effect?

Here’s a quick guide.

Notes are really important. There’s a lot of chatter online about the best methods for taking notes, but there are also a lot of harmful myths.

The simplest, last-minute exam tip of all time

Make the question simpler for yourself. Hide everything that isn’t on the spec. You will need these words later when writing the answer out, but you do NOT need them getting in the way while you work out what the question is really about.

What can you best do over the summer to help transition to A level Biology? (It's probably not what you're thinking.)

A simple but effective trick to boost your learning and revision. You just need a little buddy.

You need to know some maths for A level Biology, including to work out whether an experiment can be said to have shown an effect or not. Master this early on and it will not help you with exam questions, but also make it easier for you to learn the bits of the course that are explained using these statistical methods.

Self-marking multiple choice quiz for Photosynthesis. Using OCR A past paper exam questions.

Self-marking multiple choice quiz for Proteins. Using OCR A past paper exam questions.

Self-marking multiple choice quiz for Food Tests and Chromatography. Using OCR A past paper exam questions.

Self-marking multiple choice quiz for Phospholipids, Lipids, and Cholesterol. Using OCR A past paper exam questions.