Studying a life science at uni in Scotland

I'm doing a social science degree at Aberdeen and the way it works is that each term, you need to take 60 credits.
In first year, most courses are worth 15 credits so you have to take 4 different modules. For example, my social science degree only had one compulsory module, so I took three other courses as well.
In second year, most modules are then worth 30 credits so you can either take 2 additional first year modules, or 1 second year module.

For example, in year 1 term 1 I took Sociology, Anthropology, English and Philosophy. In year 1 term 2 I took Sociology, Anthropology, English and Film. So going into year two I could make my degree Sociology-Anthropology, or Sociology-English, or Anthropology-English.

Does that kind of make sense?

I sort of get it, but doesn't that just mean loads of extra work when you only wanted to do one thing or is it more like each is just an extra to do that relate with your course so that you know what direction you want your course to go in?

No, it's not extra work because everyone has to do the 60 credits per term, each year, so it's the same amount of work but basically you just get to try different things out. The extra courses don't relate to your degree in any way - they're basically just modules from different degree programs. For example, even though you're doing biology, you could choose a Film module or a French language module - it's really up to you.

It's obviously not for everyone, but I really love that system because my interests are pretty broad and tbh I wasn't really sure what I wanted to study when I applied. So I was able to try out a couple of different courses, see what I liked and then change my degree program accordingly.

If you already know for sure that you only want to do Molecular Biology and not try anything else out, then maybe a degree in Scotland isn't for you because you'd be doing an extra year for nothing basically.