I use to think the same when I was a high school student. But now I’m in uni and I’m best mates with med students, so I know all about the course.
So as a science major, we need to make a big distinction between HSC exam science and university science. University doesn’t require you to solve extremely complex exam questions as that’s arbitrary and irrelevant to your career which requires much more practically and application of theory, rather than trying to solve difficult exam questions. The whole reason why the HSC has these is to select a few number of students to get into a course. Where as uni focuses on learning and application in the work force.
As someone who did both HSC bio chem and investigating science. I’m telling you it barely helps at all. The uni content is so broad that the things you learn in school only cover a small surface of content. Because there’s no need to solve difficult exam questions, you can learn the content very fast as you only focuses on learning the content rather than applying it in exam scenarios.
I know many PhD graduates who can’t solve HSC exam questions, because they simply don’t need to for their career. And again the passing exam initiative was made so don’t feel like they should only focus on the exam. But rather actual learn and apply themselves in practical fields of medicine. So they can become good doctors.
I get what you're tryna say, but hear me out though;
Consider oxidative stress, a complication mechanism for Diabetes Mellitus.
Hyperglycemia promotes the formation of reactive oxygen species such as superoxide. ROS can react with DNA and proteins, thereby causing cellular damage.
- Medical students are assumed to know what disparate environmental agents such as acrolein, carbon monoxide, paraquat, Cd2+, and Zn2+ are and their distinctive qualities, know how oxidation works, etc. This is not knowledge taught at a yr 10 level, which will therefore hinder the student's ability as he/she will not have reviewed much of that content as opposed to the more prepared chemistry students. Also, we should also consider that different courses have different content and different emphasis on preemptive school content knowledge.
Additionally, it's not just for the basis of being able to understand the theory, students will in one point in their career need to use chemistry in emergency cases. For example, take that a particular medicine required for a patient was not available (say that it was too urgent to retrieve or medicine was accidentally expired and was not reordered due to system error in their system), the doctor will have to use his pharmacology skills and chemistry skills to formulate an alternative. In cases such as these, doctors who readily have done chemistry in their schooling years (or reviewed the content during university to a high standard; ie at the point where the student will not hail mary all tests in order to 'pass') will have a much higher chance of saving the patient rather than one who did legal studies or English E2 with the thought that that's somehow going to help them during their future careers lmfao. 'Oh why yes sir I have a B6 in Legal studies, so i can administer you with a death certificate of the person who died in the hands of my responsibility as that's the only thing I've gained from doing the subject' (all jokes guys don't take it srs).