SHLD I TAKE BOTH BIO HL + PSYCH HL OR IS THAT GOING TO KILL ME

[cryzstol]

Hi everyone! This is my first time using this and this is urgent, I am in need of advice, please help tyty :))))))

I need to choose my ib subjects very soon, and I don't know if I can manage taking both psychology HL and biology HL. 

Currently, I'm CERTAIN I'm going to choose: 

HL Visual Arts, SL Maths, SL English Language + Literature, and SL Chinese A 

I find psychology quite interesting and I want to take it. But I didn't take psychology in GCSE so I don't really know what it's going to be like, making this very risky. My GCSE friends who took it told me not to choose it, saying it's cancerous, but another says its fun. Moreover, my friends from yr 12/13 who take psych HL didn't really recommend it, and they say that you need to memorise a heck lot of case studies and the teachers aren't that good. And apparently the qualitative part is really annoying?

So people are telling me to do psych SL instead. But if I do that, I would have to take English Lang Lit HL, and I'm not that confident with english. 

For biology, I find it straight forward so I'm planning on taking it for HL, but everyone says biology is really content heavy and requires a lot of memorisation too. 

So if I take both subjects that require so much memorisation, is it manageable? Or too risky? If you were me, would you take Psychology HL and Bio HL at the same time, or drop psych to SL with Bio HL and Eng Lang Lit HL instead?

btw I really don't know what I want to be in the future, I just have an idea of going to either the arts & design path or psychology related path?

SEND HELP PLS thank youuuuuuuuuuuu

[aTeddy]

Heya - I took Biology HL and Psychology HL and graduated this November. It seems to me that you understand what these subjects are about and most of your information seems to be fairly accurate. For me, taking both these subjects was highly challenging and I would easily say that over 50% of my time was invested into these subjects. So maybe to help you decide if you want to go down this path, I will provide an overview of each subject individually.

In terms of Psychology, I would highly recommend you take it at HL or don't take it at all. The jump from SL to HL is as small as you could hope it to be - the core topics and options have a bit more content, there is a slightly stricter marking expectation (may 2019 onward), you study one more option (not as hard as it sounds) and you study qualitative methods (boring, but also very content light and logical). This doesn't sound small but compared to a science or some humanities, where the content jump can be as big as 2x SL, its quite tolerable. Psychology is interesting to learn, but it probably won't be the way you expect it, it's really scientific and empirical, which shocked me at first. That being said, you are right that there is a huge impetus to memorise research studies (for a ballpark figure, I memorised 91 studies (aim, method, findings, conclusions and evaluative issues) for my final exams). Nonetheless, I would say Psychology is a rewarding subject to study in IB, because you won't get the experience any other way, and if you say you're intrinsically interested in it, than I'd say you're a nice fit.

For Biology, I would approach your decision with healthy caution. Before IB, I found Biology to be really easy and so I decided to take HL. Over time, it became my favourite subject (along with Literature) and it was something I always liked to learn about, which I believe is ultimately a prominent reason that I did well in Biology in IB. The thing is, to a certain eye, Biology is incredibly dry and with that perspective, I'd say its highly unlikely you'll succeed at HL. Of the 20 candidates who took Biology in my year, only 3 took HL and these were the people who were genuinely passionate about learning Biology. If that doesn't sound like you (and I'm so not judging - you either like it or you don't) then I counsel you to take SL, which is a fairly manageable content load even to the dispassionate student. HL Biology has a mind-boggling amount of sheer content (definitely more than any other HL science and probably uncomparable to any other IB syllabus). I don't say this to scare you but as a matter of fact, because time and again, students underestimate Biology as a soft choice when it just isn't.

I actually didn't take LangLit, I took Lit, but I know the courses are similar. If English is your native language (or at least equal to your native language) and you can coherently develop complex thoughts orally and write essays well (up to you to evaluate that one) then its a pretty splashable HL subject, because the difference between SL and HL is quite minor. I begun IB1 with average scores in Engilsh, but I found the IB environment to be conducive for success and also found it to be a highly enjoyable subject at the best of times. 

I hope this information helps you to make your decision and I wish you the best of luck throughout the IB.