Visit by former IB student Andrea in 2i and 3i Biology

As a school, we have very high esteem for our former IB students who themselves have completed the programme, and thus share this experience with people all over the World. To have such students visiting their former school, to explain current students and their teacher how they managed to get successfully through this challenging programme, is a great possibility for the school’s IB Community.

This fall, we were lucky to have a visit from former student Andrea Babette Pedersen Arendt, who graduated from Nørre Gymnasium in 2021 with excellent exam results. Throughout her one year in pre-IB and two years in the IB Diploma Programme, Andrea was an appreciated friend to her classmates, and to her teachers, a highly valued participant in class discussions, where her clever and often very original questions and comments helped much in creating a relaxed and stimulating environment. Besides her capacities for academic work, Andrea is a skilled pianist and ornithologist. We at Nørre Gymnasium are particularly proud of Andrea’s qualification to the 2021 international Bio-Olympics, which took place in July.

In her presentation, Andrea explained how to organize this vast amount of information and to look for, and strive to understand, patterns and processes that are common for all living organisms. Andrea furthermore explained how best to prioritize time for preparation and assignments as well as how to prepare best for Internal Assessment and IB exams while at the same time being able to enjoy the daily life at Nørre Gymnasium.

Andrea’s best points of advice are as follows:

• Be well prepared for class and plan your assignments in due time
• Do the P1 and P2 questions (seriously – just do them!)
• Don’t google answers! Answer the questions the best you can and learn from your mistakes
• Use the many sources on the internet, such as BioNinja, Crash-course, etc.
• Ask your teacher if there are things you don’t understand
• Read the feedback from your science reports and use it to plan your IA
• Don’t expect to be original when doing your IA but do a thorough investigation that you understand and feel comfortable with.
• Start preparing your exams early
• Read the IB Biology Guide so that you know what is important to know.
• Do the previous exam papers.

IB Biology is in the Group 4 sciences along with Chemistry and Physics with which it shares many concepts. However, unlike the other sciences, Biology is also a historical science, comparable to Geology, Geography, and Astronomy, and life on our planet has often faced unexpected challenges and undergone dramatic changes to adapt to dramatically altered environmental conditions. In addition to this, the phenomenon of life itself is still poorly understood, and demonstrates emergent properties meaning that “the whole is greater than the sum of its constitutive parts”. To succeed in biology thus requires the capacity to grasp not only those structures and processes that are universal for living organisms, but also to obtain a “cosmic zoom”, where one can navigate between the many levels of complexity ranging from the biosphere through ecosystem, community, species, individual, organ system, organ, and tissue, and down to the individual cell and its components.

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