2007 Unit 4 Exam Thoughts

[squance]

The biology exam was sooooooooooo easy!!!

And I managed to finish the whole exam!!!!

WOOOHOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fantastic!

What did everybody else think?

[itsme]

Yeah, I did a lot better with this exam than the mid year.

Question: If everybody finds it easy how will they moderate it?

[BA22]

This will be considered a relatively tough exam by most. I thought it was fair and of comparable difficultly to the mid year. I think we'll see another ~80% A+ cut off

[ninwa]

easy?! ah crap i only just finished and found many qs ambiguous.

everyone at my school found it hard and incredibly long. did anyone see that for that MC about mitochondrial DNA, all the options were incorrect?

[BA22]

easy?! ah crap i only just finished and found many qs ambiguous.

everyone at my school found it hard and incredibly long. did anyone see that for that MC about mitochondrial DNA, all the options were incorrect?

nah they weren't

Mitochondrial changes at a slower rate than nuclear DNA. Nuclear DNA  can change by 50% per generation

[ninwa]

my textbook says mtDNA changes at a faster but more regular rate than nuclear DNA.

oh well, I picked that one anyway

[BA22]

my textbook says mtDNA changes at a faster but more regular rate than nuclear DNA.

oh well, I picked that one anyway

yeh, that was the only possible answer really, haha.

Note that mtDNA mutates at a faster rate, which is regular. But nuclear DNA will change more profoundly between generations as it is inherited from two sources

There was also a cool question about mutations in introns relating to pseudogenes. There really wasn't much on hominid development though. Yay.

[ninwa]

oh, I see! thanks

[astarael]

but didn't the question say mutates?

[BA22]

but didn't the question say mutates?

i can't remember honestly, haha

But C was the only answer that seemed right to be honest

[astarael]

i'm 98% certain it did say mutates.  maybe they'll award marks for both B and C - they did that for one question on the midyear.

[BA22]

i'm 98% certain it did say mutates.  maybe they'll award marks for both B and C - they did that for one question on the midyear.

what was alternative B?

Besides, the mutation rate of nuclear DNA can be varible, it can be fast or slow depending on the selective pressures of the phenotype that arises from such mutations.

mtDNA mutates at a  predictable rate

[ninwa]

wasn't B something like mtDNA has more genes than nuclear DNA?

sigh, the more I think about it the more I realised how much I fluffed that exam. biology should get marked up more lol

[BA22]

wasn't B something like mtDNA has more genes than nuclear DNA?

sigh, the more I think about it the more I realised how much I fluffed that exam. biology should get marked up more lol

Yeh bio can be a bit rough sometimes, if the performance was better, we might see more sclaing, bu unfortunately, like PE and HHD, it must go down.

Yeh alternative B is not correct. The human genome has more genes than the number of nucleotide base pairs in mtDNA, so it's a fair difference

[ninwa]

does anybody have a copy of the exam btw?

i forgot to steal one off one of the teachers