Why is Biology HSC so darn hard?
HSC biology is a large course with concepts which build upon previous concepts. If you fall behind things will snow ball. Things will not get easier. But if you stay up to date, we promise you that you will love HSC biology and it won’t seem as challenging. Biology is the course that is taken by nearly all medical doctors, scientists and university students alike. This means it has to be worth your time and anything that is worthwhile is going to be hard. But what makes it challenge, we will go over that in the
Reasons why HSC biology is hard
- Large amount of content
8 Modules with over 100 syllabus dot points. There is a lot to learn, but we will show you how to make what seems huge work for you.
- Complexity of ideas
Ok this is a big one. The ideas covered are actually challenging at first. In reality they are no more complex then what you already experience in your day to day life. The difference is biology can illustrate things you never even saw. This makes the ideas unfamiliar at first. With time you will find them simple and digestible. Everything that is easy for you now was once hard. Think about all that time you spent learning basic math.
- Breadth not depth
You do not cover the concepts in much depth, rather HSC biology is designed to show you around the enormous realm of biology. It is important to understand scientists spend there entire life studying just one of the 100s of concepts you will encounter. This means you can’t know everything about each dot point – no-one can – but you will need to know the amount required for your assignments and exams.
- Dreaded memorization of content
You will get stuck and not be able to explore the breadth of biology if you just try to memorize everything. Instead understand the content and try to link the ideas you learn in one lesson with ideas from other lessons.
But what makes it easy?
- It may be hard for you until you reach the end of the syllabus. But then something magical happens. You gain a persepective. An insight. Then it’s like all the ideas look the same. The syllabus which at first seemed huge, seems like they could have added another couple pages of content.
- You can understand it and soak up content words through osmosis. You will hear words and not know what they mean. The beauty of bio is 2 weeks later you will be having a convo and through the word out there without even thinking.
- But the best thing about biology is it will end up being one big story once you gain a macroscopic perspective. Fortunately, we will help you gain this perspective and become a divergent thinker.
What this means for you
- Study notes are not enough. Study notes are really just a way for you to find concepts when you actually start to study. Hopefully writing them forces you to engage with the content but in all honestly I ranked first without ever writing a single study note for HSC biology.
- Do exam-style questions and always mark your answers. Ok. This is my bread and butter. Being able to do exam questions means you are training how you will play.
- Start small and do it consistently. You build up to marathons, you don’t just start with one. We will give you small exam questions early on so you aren’t just dropped in the deep end when exams come round.
- Spaced repetition is key.
How can we help you?
Our mission is to make learning enjoyable. We offer a free interactive biology textbook for year 11 & year 12 students.
Our lessons are inspired by the early comic books. You will see Bug-man short comics which will contextualise the lesson, motivate you to keep studying and most importantly, want to study for hours on end. We want you to not just survive HSC biology but thrive and enjoy it.
Guess what in our free interactive textbooks, we give you all the study notes with exam style questions, answers and interactive quizzes.
About the author
Joshua Mills has a bachelor of Adv Science (medical science and medicinal chemistry) from USYD. He founded Edzion.com in 2019 – an online complimentary education company to support and inspire high school science students. Currently he’s undertaking higher degree research, working in a team on a therapeutic to treat children’s bone cancer. In his spare time, he runs ultra-marathons.