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what is harder a medicine degree or A-levels?
anyone doing a medical degree and has any opinions on this? Would love to hear what A-levels you did and how you are finding a medical degree. I have heard some people say they actually found their A-levels harder than a medical degree, which I found quite surprising! I do A-levels in computer science, maths and chemistry (and I did AS French in Y12) for context. Thank you!
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You're really comparing apples and oranges - for any degree (including medicine) the nature of degree level study and how its assessed is usually so different from A-levels, that it's impossible to compare them. While the material at degree level is necessarily more advanced, the way it's assessed is often a lot less rigid and more open to giving students the benefit of the doubt. For A-levels this is necessary because they are public exams taken across the country, whereas degree level exams are internal to each uni (albeit have external examiners to validate the marking and difficulty of the exam).
An example I was given by the former chemistry admissions tutor at Southampton was that at A-level, when drawing some organic reaction mechanism if your curly arrow is not EXACTLY pointing at the correct target, you don't get the mark. At degree level, if they can see you're clearly indicating the right mechanism but your diagram was just a little sloppy, you will still normally be awarded the mark. This is I think fairly indicative of how degree level work is marked in general - you're generally more likely to be rewarded for showing what you know, even if it's not "perfect". At A-level to get the top grades you really do need to avoid making any mistakes though.
An example I was given by the former chemistry admissions tutor at Southampton was that at A-level, when drawing some organic reaction mechanism if your curly arrow is not EXACTLY pointing at the correct target, you don't get the mark. At degree level, if they can see you're clearly indicating the right mechanism but your diagram was just a little sloppy, you will still normally be awarded the mark. This is I think fairly indicative of how degree level work is marked in general - you're generally more likely to be rewarded for showing what you know, even if it's not "perfect". At A-level to get the top grades you really do need to avoid making any mistakes though.
Reply 2
They’re very different, so you can’t compare directly. And as @ecolier points out Medicine is 5 years AND includes things you have to ‘learn’ in a very different way like histories, introducing yourself etc.
In general I’d say the main difference is that it’s a lot harder to get through a medicine degree without being fairly organised and doing some work
With exams coming up, me and my friends are all swapping revision timetables, delegating who’ll make notes and do mini-tutorials on what topics, planning practical exam sessions, harassing older years for notes etc. This is all before we start exam leave and actual revision.
We’ve also just been on placement so you have to learn how to balance placement and what you can learn there, with the book learning you need to do as well for exams.
For A levels I literally just planned to do a past paper a day, and some people did basically nothing and did fine. With medicine the choice is little and often throughout the year or Death Revision in April
Medicine is also way more fun
You don’t get let loose in a hospital during your A levels 
In general I’d say the main difference is that it’s a lot harder to get through a medicine degree without being fairly organised and doing some work
With exams coming up, me and my friends are all swapping revision timetables, delegating who’ll make notes and do mini-tutorials on what topics, planning practical exam sessions, harassing older years for notes etc. This is all before we start exam leave and actual revision.We’ve also just been on placement so you have to learn how to balance placement and what you can learn there, with the book learning you need to do as well for exams.
For A levels I literally just planned to do a past paper a day, and some people did basically nothing and did fine. With medicine the choice is little and often throughout the year or Death Revision in April
Medicine is also way more fun
You don’t get let loose in a hospital during your A levels Reply 3
Medicine is harder than A-levels. For starters, the workload is wayy larger. It's also not just purely an academic subject, you have to be good at written exams and practical exams. You need to know: 10s of Examinations (& findings), pathophysiology/risk factors/aetiology/management of 100s of diseases, 20+ investigations, interpreting images, procedures, history taking, anatomy (bones, nerves, blood vessels, minutae into organs & how all this relates to each other), psychology/sociology, genetics, understanding & evaluating medical research, biochemistry, immunology, pharmacology, law and even more.
Imagine having to learn about every single organ system in the body and how things go wrong. I was only at medical school for a couple of years and we had to learn: musculoskeletal stuff, rheumatology & orthopaedics, dermatology, haematology, respiratory medicine, cardiology, renal, gastro, endocrinology, obs & gynae++ more.
I concede to this only: If you're studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry & learning STEP 1-3, you have a SLIGHT point. Higher level maths subjects (idk about the physics - i'm told it's difficult) are probably conceptually more difficult than medicine. There isn't anything in medicine like hard further maths questions. However, the workload in medicine is very high:
In a normal week: I had to be places 5days/week, write 3-6 pages of PBL, making presentation of my PBL topic, practice examinations on my friends/in hospital, go through 10 lectures (up to 70 slides)/week, make disease profiles, learn tons of anatomy and research stuff I didn't understand. I am probably forgetting stuff
This not including things like annual analytical review of medical literature, examined presentations, logbooks, exam revision, OSCE prep, uni medical society stuff.
So no, A-levels are not harder than medicine. You have much more free time during A-levels.
Imagine having to learn about every single organ system in the body and how things go wrong. I was only at medical school for a couple of years and we had to learn: musculoskeletal stuff, rheumatology & orthopaedics, dermatology, haematology, respiratory medicine, cardiology, renal, gastro, endocrinology, obs & gynae++ more.
I concede to this only: If you're studying Maths, Further Maths, Physics, Chemistry & learning STEP 1-3, you have a SLIGHT point. Higher level maths subjects (idk about the physics - i'm told it's difficult) are probably conceptually more difficult than medicine. There isn't anything in medicine like hard further maths questions. However, the workload in medicine is very high:
In a normal week: I had to be places 5days/week, write 3-6 pages of PBL, making presentation of my PBL topic, practice examinations on my friends/in hospital, go through 10 lectures (up to 70 slides)/week, make disease profiles, learn tons of anatomy and research stuff I didn't understand. I am probably forgetting stuff
This not including things like annual analytical review of medical literature, examined presentations, logbooks, exam revision, OSCE prep, uni medical society stuff.
So no, A-levels are not harder than medicine. You have much more free time during A-levels.
Reply 4
Omg, no wonder I forgot - neuro was the bane of my life. Embryology as well, to this day I still don't understand it.
Reply 5
Thankfully you don't have to know a lot of Embryology, I remember it only being a couple of marks in EoY exams. Neuro on the other hand.... you do you, someone has to like it!!
----
Final point of comparison between Medicine & Maths/HardSci A-levels.
If studying were like drinking: A-level Further Maths would be like drinking a bottle of hot sauce - hard to swallow, quite rough but thankfully it's only a bottle. Medicine is more like drinking water - clear, pretty easy to get down... only a medical degree is like drinking from a fire hose.
----
Final point of comparison between Medicine & Maths/HardSci A-levels.
If studying were like drinking: A-level Further Maths would be like drinking a bottle of hot sauce - hard to swallow, quite rough but thankfully it's only a bottle. Medicine is more like drinking water - clear, pretty easy to get down... only a medical degree is like drinking from a fire hose.
Reply 6
nelly70
OP
5
@utilitymaker @becausethenight @artful_lounger Thank you for you so much for all your responses!
You definitely seem to be saying similar sorts of things and there definitely seems to be a lot of aspects to a medical degree.
I'm in Y13 and I'm taking a gap year, I've found with A-levels, I haven't maintained a work-life balance and they have impacted my mental health, since I'm quite determined to do the best that I can and I put a lot of time and effort into them to maximise my potential. So I'm not sure if medicine would be too much for me? Thank you for all your reponses!
You definitely seem to be saying similar sorts of things and there definitely seems to be a lot of aspects to a medical degree.
I'm in Y13 and I'm taking a gap year, I've found with A-levels, I haven't maintained a work-life balance and they have impacted my mental health, since I'm quite determined to do the best that I can and I put a lot of time and effort into them to maximise my potential. So I'm not sure if medicine would be too much for me? Thank you for all your reponses!
Reply 7
21
Whatever degree you do, if it builds on an A-level it will be much harder than that A-level.
I think what some people mean is that because you're improving at your subject at the same time, your degree might be easier than A-levels relative to your ability at the time. But definitely not in terms of "absolute" difficulty.
I think what some people mean is that because you're improving at your subject at the same time, your degree might be easier than A-levels relative to your ability at the time. But definitely not in terms of "absolute" difficulty.
Reply 8
18
Original post
by nelly70anyone doing a medical degree and has any opinions on this? Would love to hear what A-levels you did and how you are finding a medical degree. I have heard some people say they actually found their A-levels harder than a medical degree, which I found quite surprising! I do A-levels in computer science, maths and chemistry (and I did AS French in Y12) for context. Thank you!
My daughter and her friends who also studied medicine have all previously expressed the opinion that the subject matter is no more complex than A levels, even that quite a lot of it is less complex. The greater challenge is the volume of information you have to remember and how it relates to other information. I guess it depends whether you struggled more with complexity or with volume, or with both.
Also worth noting that medicine degree courses aren't all structured the same. For example my daughter's course each day was half day lectures and half day self directed study. This was one of her main reasons for choosing that Uni. She felt her learning style was much more suited to consolidating her learning in her own time... she found lectures less useful. In some respects she is similar to you in that she tries to maximise her knowledge and learning. It took her some time to adjust from feeling very confident about 90% of A level content to being very confident about only 70% of the degree content.... don't take those figures literally, just trying to illustrate the point.
BTW she took Maths, Biology and Chemistry at A level. She found Chemistry the greatest challenge. Thankfully there isn't much Chemistry content in the medicine degree itself.
Reply 9
Gcses are the hardest.
Reply 10
Another vote for embryology being a particularly hated subject - it just seemed all so bizarre and random in places. Give me immunology any day. 
Reply 11
nelly70
OP
5
Original post
by meddadMy daughter and her friends who also studied medicine have all previously expressed the opinion that the subject matter is no more complex than A levels, even that quite a lot of it is less complex. The greater challenge is the volume of information you have to remember and how it relates to other information. I guess it depends whether you struggled more with complexity or with volume, or with both.
Also worth noting that medicine degree courses aren't all structured the same. For example my daughter's course each day was half day lectures and half day self directed study. This was one of her main reasons for choosing that Uni. She felt her learning style was much more suited to consolidating her learning in her own time... she found lectures less useful.
BTW she took Maths, Biology and Chemistry at A level. She found Chemistry the greatest challenge. Thankfully there isn't much Chemistry content in the medicine degree itself.
Also worth noting that medicine degree courses aren't all structured the same. For example my daughter's course each day was half day lectures and half day self directed study. This was one of her main reasons for choosing that Uni. She felt her learning style was much more suited to consolidating her learning in her own time... she found lectures less useful.
BTW she took Maths, Biology and Chemistry at A level. She found Chemistry the greatest challenge. Thankfully there isn't much Chemistry content in the medicine degree itself.
Hi @meddad thank you for your reply! I haven't actually studied biology at A-level, but I have been told by several people this isn't much of an issue. I have heard from people in my year that biology A-level has a lot of content, so I don't think I would have as much experience in managing large volumes of content.
I actually have found chemistry to be the easiest of my 3 A-levels to study for (with computer science being the hardest) even though in my mocks have have done around the same in all 3 of the subjects. I think this is because the content of computer science is more difficult to get your head around (programming in particular), so I think the subject matter can be quite complex, which is what I have found challenging, but with chemistry I have found the subject matter less challenging, so maybe I would enjoy medicine more so?
Thank you so much for your reply!
Reply 12
nelly70
OP
5
Original post
by sciencegcsesssGcses are the hardest.
noo A-levels are much harder, but I guess it depends on the subjects you take.
Reply 13
Original post
by sciencegcsesssGcses are the hardest.
Lol ok mate
I can see why you did say that though… GCSEs like computer science was the death of me back in the day but it’s in no way comparable to the difficulty of A-level maths. Not even in the slightest of chance.
Reply 14
I’m a current year 3 med student - year 4 fast approaching.
I would say that being a year 13 student and med applicant is harder than being a med student. The pressure of grades, complexity of material, on top of the stress of ucas/BMAT/ucat/interviews and balancing a job and other responsibilities made it a really really tough year.
As a med student, the workload is heavy and the pace is fast, the key is keeping up - if you got behind it would be really difficult to catch up. But the material isn’t harder than A level and it actually all fits together more logically than A level. I manage to fit in my course, a social life, SU commitments and a relationship with someone in a different uni town, and while this year has been more placement heavy than the first two years I’ve been chipping away at the study and feel on top of things. Life feels less stressful and more manageable than it did in year 13, and I’m someone who has struggled with mental health over the last few years. But discipline and good time management are the key imo.
I would say that being a year 13 student and med applicant is harder than being a med student. The pressure of grades, complexity of material, on top of the stress of ucas/BMAT/ucat/interviews and balancing a job and other responsibilities made it a really really tough year.
As a med student, the workload is heavy and the pace is fast, the key is keeping up - if you got behind it would be really difficult to catch up. But the material isn’t harder than A level and it actually all fits together more logically than A level. I manage to fit in my course, a social life, SU commitments and a relationship with someone in a different uni town, and while this year has been more placement heavy than the first two years I’ve been chipping away at the study and feel on top of things. Life feels less stressful and more manageable than it did in year 13, and I’m someone who has struggled with mental health over the last few years. But discipline and good time management are the key imo.
Reply 15
Original post
by nelly70noo A-levels are much harder, but I guess it depends on the subjects you take.
Original post
by CaptainDuckieLol ok mate
I can see why you did say that though… GCSEs like computer science was the death of me back in the day but it’s in no way comparable to the difficulty of A-level maths. Not even in the slightest of chance.
I can see why you did say that though… GCSEs like computer science was the death of me back in the day but it’s in no way comparable to the difficulty of A-level maths. Not even in the slightest of chance.
I was just being sarcastic lol
(edited 3 years ago)
Reply 16
18
Original post
by nelly70Hi @meddad thank you for your reply! I haven't actually studied biology at A-level, but I have been told by several people this isn't much of an issue. I have heard from people in my year that biology A-level has a lot of content, so I don't think I would have as much experience in managing large volumes of content.
I actually have found chemistry to be the easiest of my 3 A-levels to study for (with computer science being the hardest) even though in my mocks have have done around the same in all 3 of the subjects. I think this is because the content of computer science is more difficult to get your head around (programming in particular), so I think the subject matter can be quite complex, which is what I have found challenging, but with chemistry I have found the subject matter less challenging, so maybe I would enjoy medicine more so?
Thank you so much for your reply!
I actually have found chemistry to be the easiest of my 3 A-levels to study for (with computer science being the hardest) even though in my mocks have have done around the same in all 3 of the subjects. I think this is because the content of computer science is more difficult to get your head around (programming in particular), so I think the subject matter can be quite complex, which is what I have found challenging, but with chemistry I have found the subject matter less challenging, so maybe I would enjoy medicine more so?
Thank you so much for your reply!
You're correct that not doing Biology at A level isn't a problem in itself, although it reduces the number of Med Schools where you can apply, as some require it.
The majority of Med Schools require Chemistry A level even though there's not a lot of Chemistry content in the degree. I read that it's because a study found that the learning style required for A level chemistry is well suited to studying medicine.
Personally, I don't think you will know for sure until you actually do the degree. There were a few times when my daughter felt like giving up, and that didn't seem that uncommon, but she's a qualified doctor now. It's a challenging degree, but I suspect you knew that already.
BTW, I edited my original post with an additional comment, in case you didn't see it.
Reply 17
18
Original post
by sciencegcsesssI was just being sarcastic lol
Have you yet mastered using BIC pens though 🤔
Reply 18
nelly70
OP
5
Original post
by sciencegcsesssI was just being sarcastic lol
thank goodness I would have been a bit jealous haha
Reply 19
nelly70
OP
5
Original post
by meddadHave you yet mastered using BIC pens though 🤔
what is difficult with using a bic biro pen?
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