Although I haven't found out my final scores, I'm trying to decide whether or not I'd use IB Chemistry HL and IB Biology HL credits (I'm in Life Sciences I, looking at Biochemistry co-op stream).

I sort of "pre-read" IB biology and I found that I hated re-learning things I read on my own, even though it was much easier and I got higher marks. It just really bored me. Therefore I'm scared that if IB does overlap with first year courses a lot, I don't want to bore myself out first term and make an unnecessary program change or something.

So: is it possible to take a peek at some coursework from BIOL 1A03/1M03 and CHEM 1A03/1AA3? Or, for past IB students: was IB very similar to these first year courses?

For now, I'm thinking of at least skipping BIOL 1M03 (I hated evolution) and CHEM 1A03 and just taking BIOL 1A03 and CHEM 1AA3 since it does give a good review/easier marks.

Note: This is important to me because I wanted to use that free space to take more physics courses than usual in case i want to switch to physical science.

All of my friends who did IB are in health sci and they said that they learned everything in Chem 1A+1AA already so it was just revision for them. Can't comment on biology though. I'm not sure if they were all taking 1A+1AA just for high marks or because McMaster gave them a grade 12 equivalent credit. I know McMaster does some weird shit in terms of exchanging AP credits where they give you a university credit that's equivalent to a high school course (usually a course taken by those missing the prereq cuz they didnt do it in high school) so you may want to see what credit they'll be willing to give you for your HL courses.

For Chemistry HL I'll be getting Chem 1A03 and 1AA3
For Biology HL I'll be getting BIOL 1A03 and 1M03.

If anyone else can comment on the difficulty of bio that'd be great

The bios are relatively easy. That being said you can do second year bio without needing bio 1a03 and 1m03. So your call once again

Originally Posted by Starships2

The bios are relatively easy. That being said you can do second year bio without needing bio 1a03 and 1m03. So your call once again

Since when?! Every second-year bio course requires 1M03 and/or 1A03 or an equivalent (depending on the course).

I meant by using their IB credits and receiving credits for both bios, they wouldnt be at a disadvantage.

Oh yeah, completely forgot to mention that Bio 1A03 recently incorporated the blended learning model so you're gonna have an online component for the majority of your lectures and since you said you don't enjoy relearning stuff, i get the feeling you're probably gonna hate your life so that's something to consider.
Online modules make me cry cuz they eat up a significant chunk of your weekend.

But even if you do end up redeeming your credits, you're probably going to end up doing Bio 2B03 sometime in the future which is a continuation of Bio 1A03 and it has the exact same format of blended learning. So you'll have to think about whether you would rather do blended learning bio twice or do it once with no prior experience with blended learning bio. You'll do blended learning in Chem 1A03 and Psych 1X03, but theyre kinda different from the way bio works in my opinion.

Blended learning is some serious bullshit; it's a sugar-coated name for "90% online self learning". And it's so funny because when you go on tours and stuff, no one mentions anything about blended learning (and if someone does, it's usually a small one-liner that you'll probably miss cuz you didn't think it was important).