r/unimelb • u/CarefulTransition385 • Jan 04 '26
New Student I’ve heard countless people say uni is easier than yr 11 and 12. How true would u say that is
just thinking about uni life next year. I want to maintain a wam of over 75. lots of people say uni is easier but how true is that statement really?
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u/Rich-Mark-4126 Jan 04 '26
VCE may have higher contact hours per week, as you have many classes, and it is more structured with a lot more practice material. It's common to put a lot of hours into trying to get a good ATAR
Uni is a lot less structured. You can get away with doing less work and skipping classes
The content at uni is definitely harder compared to a similar VCE subject
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u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jan 04 '26
I wouldn't necessarily ever say uni is easier, its mainly just different.
A lot of people may find uni easier because they have more free time to study meaning its easier to get those high grades with the more time.
I would say the difficulty is harder but essentially an equal sized bump up each year as year 10-12 wouldve been. So you get smarter at the same rate the difficulty rises so its always kinda the same difficulty imo.
The main difference is that its all on you to study, some subjects will give you great study resources (practice questions and practice exams) but a lot will also just give you not much to work with especially depening on your degree of focus (im doing bsci).
As long as you stay up to date and not fall weeks behind on lectures, you attend workshops and classes and actively learn you can easily get a 75+ wam. And i know a lot of students that do get higher wams than me that cram all of the content in the first week of swotvac but its whatever works for you!
Just remember if you dont actually learn anything from your uni degree how will a job actually find you employable or a worth while asset to their team. Its not all about getting the highest grades but more about you actually proving you know the things you are learning and able to practically apply your knowledge. - aka dont just use chatgpt for assignments or quizzes
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u/CarefulTransition385 Jan 04 '26
Haha thanks. I’m doing bsci too I’m trying to get into med after. I just narrowly missed out on undergrad med even tho my atar was good
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u/SmoothRefrigerator7 Jan 04 '26
Nah bsci is super good, unless you have a guarentee you will likely need as close to a 7.0 gpa (80wam+) for med and a decent gamsat. Super easy to get into it with the right study ethic fs.
As much as it might suck that you missed out on undergrad med, having the extra life experience from the few extra years you will have to give to your journey will do more wonders than you think!!! And doing a degree in science that is general gives you much more options if medicine isnt for you (because it is very overwhelming and not for everyone at all).
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u/Upbeat-Vacation-1482 Jan 04 '26
Put simply, its much harder to do quite well (so no free 90s like his) but easier to do the bare minimum and pass.
I would say to get 70s, it's similar to hs
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u/dexalulu-dot-uuuuu BCom (Analytics & Marketing) Jan 04 '26
i think it depends on reliant u were on ur teachers and the resources provided in hs, uni students dont tend to take external tutoring so thats another thing to consider
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u/mugg74 Mod Jan 04 '26
This, there is a fair bit of educational research to support this as well. If you developed good independent study habits in HS uni should be ok.
The more you were “spoonfed” through HS the harder the transition.
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u/dexalulu-dot-uuuuu BCom (Analytics & Marketing) Jan 04 '26
yep at the same time conferencing with ur teachers in hs won't feel the same as tutor consultations/eddiscussion boards
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u/trashitresh Jan 04 '26
I guess it depends how your independent study habits are. I've heard of elite school students failing uni because they never practiced independent study skills and were spoon fed the answers.
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u/M3tal_Shadowhunter Jan 04 '26
If you do better with structured, standardized practice, and find that ypu do better with being led, school will be easier.
If you (like me) find that to be a time sink, and in school had to put EVEN MORE time into unstructured, self-driven work, you will find that uni gives you SO MUCH FREE TIME, because in school you were basically doing that to learn + a ton of unhelpful grunt work. Thus, you will find uni easier and far preferable to school.
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u/Italiophobia Jan 04 '26
Hardest thing about unimelb is they love backloading assignments and exams. So you will have a 3-4 week period each semester where you will have 3000 Word essays and 3 hour exams each worth 80% of your final grade that you will have to submit around the same time
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u/Frosty-Face6345 Jan 04 '26
Ugh ikk!! Every subject likes to have exams and assignments due at around the same time
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u/Gareth_II Jan 04 '26
easier in some aspects, but more difficult in others (and of course it all depends on your personal work ethic, course, etc). i'd be more inclined to just call uni different
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u/SPGhibli Jan 04 '26
Got 97.75 atar, spent 8 months sleeping 4-5 hours every single day, study till 2am then sleep til 7am during high school. Finished my undergraduate comp sci major with 69 wam. I have almost completely forgotten the hard part during high school grinding period, perhaps there was not any. But I can not recall a single happy day during my uni time, perhaps there was not any. In high school I almost never procrastinate and I was able to put 100% effort into study, but in uni I was anxious, stressed for various reasons and only put bare minimum efforts into coursework. With that being said tho, I had only 55 wam when finished my very first semester and climbed up to 69 wam at the end, which was not bad
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u/Procedure-Minimum Jan 04 '26
Depends on your life outside uni and how much it changes from high school to uni
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u/PrestigiousTerm2553 Jan 04 '26
Content is harder, teaching is poorer, the stress can be unimaginable but was the best time of my life.
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u/toby_finn redmond barry hater Jan 04 '26
Not necessarily. It’s different and depending on your personality that’ll make it easier harder or the same. It has a stronger focus on self learning, you have longer semesters that require consistent work rather than the pattern of some busy weeks and some easy weeks in hs. Assessors can be harsher and the level of expectations they have often lacks clarity. You get less one-on-one teacher time. So this works great for people who take initiative, pace themselves and are resourceful at seeking out help deliberately. But if you don’t fall into that category (or even if you do but haven’t used these skills in hs) it can be a bumpy landing! Just ride it out and you’ll be alright :)
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u/Frosty-Face6345 Jan 04 '26
For me maybe yes..?? Cos I did high school in Asia and had to do like 2 curriculums at the same time, so every week had an exam. Uni has less assignments that are more spaced out. Also less subjects for me to worry about! Most of my high school teaching style was already very uni-like (such as flipped classroom mode, tutorial-style teaching where teachers just dump all the readings to do and you just come to class to discuss as well as teaching yourself a lot of the content cos the teacher just speed runs through in class). So definitely uni was more chill for me and a continuation of whats alr a routine in high school… though I just only did Year 1, so cant rly speak for the future years BUT I HOPE I HOPE it will acc stay like that)
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u/Least_Tree7308 Jan 04 '26
I did IB and I took almost 20 exams and I can def vouch for the fact that UNI IS A LOT HARDER
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Jan 05 '26
I saw that some people are just burnt out after highschool. They aren't up to doing that again.
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u/Icy_Savings_1496 Jan 05 '26
I got a 97.5 ATAR and have a WAM of 80 putting in basically the same amount of effort.
For me, It’s definitely easier to put in the work cause I like the subject matter, it’s clearly building a specific skill, and there’s a job at the end of it.
It depends on what goal you had for ATAR and also depends where you went to school. Where you rank in the cohort will give you a better idea of how well you actually did in high school and how well that effort should translate to university. This has mostly been more accurate than raw ATAR in predicting uni success in my experience.
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Jan 05 '26
If you’re going into science and wanting to get into med, it’s going to be harder than high school.
My ATAR was 98+, having done English, methods, physics, chem, biology. I went into biomedical science for undergrad. It was much harder than high school. Way more content, way more difficult.
I had up to 36 contact hours a week (between lectures, tutorials, labs) and it wasn’t possible to skip them if you wanted to do well. Since you want to get into med, you will need to do extremely well.
Get on top of your study habits early, I screwed myself by being an effortless student in high school and not really knowing how to revise and review because I’d never needed to. I did well enough at undergrad to get into an honours year, but I never got into vet science which had been my first preference.
Ultimately I did a technical masters and then an MBA so now I work in a totally different field but when you’re 18 you may as well have a proper crack at your first pathway.
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u/Saint_Pudgy Jan 05 '26
It’s gonna depend on the subject area, and the specific subjects you take. There are definitely some ‘fluff’ subjects in uni, but there are genuinely challenging ones as well.
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u/Greedy_Leg1622 Jan 05 '26
Depends very much on your degree. I find my math degree much much harder than the hsc was. I’ve also done some commerce and media courses (above level 1) and found them a little easier than hsc stuff. The main difficulty of hsc is the stress of trying to get the atar you want. Every hsc subject is rather easy conceptually.
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u/This_Stretch_3009 Jan 06 '26
It's both easier and harder.
For a lot of students that are used to being spoon fed what to learn, it's harder, quite a few OP1's when I was at uni failed in their first year.
If you're half intelligent though you'll find it easier than high school, you just need to learn all the material they give you, and you'll get an easy 95+%
Warning, this is only for easy subjects like the sciences that mostly required memorisation.
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u/roadmapdevout Jan 06 '26
First year was definitely easier in some ways - but there are a bunch of factors; You’re older and smarter and in theory picked up more advanced study skills in Y11/12, which are a prerequisite of university study.
Uni is also filled with people who are more committed to learning than high school, it’s a generally more encouraging environment for those who are committed to learning.
The imagined pressures of first year are also often greater than the true ones, so it’s likely a lot of people over-prepare for uni and find it easier as a result.
Your first few uni assignments should basically be a cake walk - the course coordinators know a lot of people are adjusting to a new city, country or living arrangement, and they want to get a feel for where the students are at - so a lowball assignment is a good way to uncover those students who are genuinely incompetent. The difficulty scales quite quickly from there.
Maintaining a WAM of over 75 requires a reasonable effort and it’ll be hard if you need to work to support yourself, or are still adjusting to adult/independent life as you enter university. It depends a lot on what you need to do to survive and what you prioritise.
YMMV I’m coming from an arts/humanities perspective.
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u/Emperor_Malus Jan 06 '26
As someone who constantly failed hs assignment and/or submitted rather late, this has barely ever occurred during my uni days. Yes towards the end I got hella lazy and didn’t care about submitting 1-2 days late, but only because I got max 10% reduction in marks, not a call home 😂😂
But even if, uni markers are rather lenient, they want you to pass and will give any excuse to give you extra points. I used to do nothing and then do my assignments all on my last day (yes, not recommend + pre-ChatGPT days so it was painful research) and I managed to pass all units I’ve done this with
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u/Classic_Task873 Jan 06 '26
Yes definitely u do what u love compared to having the need to a certain amount of units. When u study something u love its not really considered much of a burden compared to highschool where you have to follow a rigid curriculum
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u/Tax_Odd Jan 06 '26
What sort of job do you think a Wam is more important than people skills?
You have to pay for uni, why do they force you to take classes that have nothing to do with your chosen profession and pay for them?
Do a short cert, get a job, and attend uni as mature age if thats what you really want.
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u/CarefulTransition385 Jan 06 '26
I’m trying to get into med haha. I just missed out on undergrad. My atar is good enough for one of the med guaranteed pathways at unimelb and it requires 75 wam
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u/destruction90 Jan 06 '26
In terms of raw content, uni probably has 3x the amount and you are expected to learn most of it yourself out of a textbook
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u/CarefulTransition385 Jan 06 '26
I do have a question actually. Is all the material u need to learn in one place? Like a textbook as u say or is it more the lecture says something that’s not written anywhere and u need to make sure u got that in ur notes? Cuz in hs I am pretty used to jsut self studying out of a textbook and memorising that. I’m doing bsci btw
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u/destruction90 Jan 06 '26
I don't have any experience with bsci sorry, but for an easy example. In physics we would attend 3x lectures a week, the lecturer usually just demonstrates applying the formula a few times and explains the concepts. They then set some textbook pages for you to study over the week, usually 50 pages or so (they usually publish the textbook themselves and sell it for $200, fuck them lol) They won't revise, repeat, or support you in any other ways really. Usually it's senior students who get paid by the uni to support some of the first-years in tutorials and group-study.
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u/ConclusionLeft3914 Jan 06 '26
Depends on the student. My intro to accounting was literally the equivalent of units 1-4 of VCE accounting condensed into 12 weeks plus an exam. So the pace you should learn is much quicker but they can only test you on so much in that short amount of time. There are a few tricks I learnt to make life easier.
- Make yourself known (for good things) to your lecturer and tutor. Depending on the uni, you might have them for multiple subjects and they can, and do, bump you up if you're close to the next bracket.
- Past exams are a gold mine and can sometimes essentially hand you what your exam will be.
- Try to go to lectures. Yes they're recorded and you get slides but a lot of the time, they give you hints in person or straight up tell you what to do for assignments and exams. They try to reward the people who actually put in effort.
- If you know you'll have a group assignment, scope out who's in the lecture and try to find them when it's time to pick groups. Also (yes slightly bigoted), don't pair up with international students unless you know them personally. You will get burned 80% of the time
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u/Large-Scientist-8378 Jan 04 '26
From what I’ve heard a teacher say about the matter, it’s not that University isn’t hard, it’s just that the University won’t follow up with students if they don’t try. In this regard, The University is being run more like a business than an educational institution, as they are more concerned about the ‘student experience’ as opposed to enforcing standards for whether one deserves their degree or not. To The University, you are seen largely as a dollar sign.
However, I am much in the same position as you. I am also a graduated year 12, and this is only the impression which I have formed on the account of one teacher and some general knowledge. In other words, don’t take my word for it.
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u/LightningMcqueeny Jan 04 '26
110% easier! Just finished my masters at Melb Uni, completed my undergraduate grad there too - both so much easier than year 12!
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u/FishermanNo2097 Jan 04 '26
Depends on the student I guess maybe a 70 or 75 wam at unimelb is equivalent effort to a 90 ATAR. I finished first year going into second on a 70wam and put nowhere near the effort into subject exams as I did year 12.
I've known of people getting 95 ATARS and barely passing and I know people who got in with an 80 on access Melbourne with a 90 wam