Guys, how much of this is true? Do you need to have dux, done STAR courses to actually have the "brain" good enough to do well in Health sciences in Auckland?
I hate to disrespect your teacher but what a load of bollocks. Also for the record, I fail to see how being the Dux automatically grants extra brain power compared to someone with the same level of achievement who isn't a Dux. I also fail to see how STAR courses automatically grants extra brain power.
Sure, you need a bit of brain power and ability to understand and integrate in order to keep up with what's going on, but that is in the sense that someone with an IQ below 90 is likely to struggle with the course.
Intelligence (which in our context deals with a mixture of abilities of understanding, reasoning, and learning) does
not dictate whether one gets into med or not. As a 100-level science course, one of the biggest things is volume of information which you need to be able to recall and apply in an exam, and preferably understand.
Learning techniques differ between people, and, inevitably, between intelligence levels. But whether you rote-learned the processes and purposes of the carnitine cycle (don't worry about what this is yet) without understanding a word of it, or you fully appreciate the concepts behind it and can give the processes and purposes just by intuitive thinking using your understanding, as long as you put the right answers on the exam paper, you'll get the marks.
In short: no, you don't need to be the top student to get into med. I don't know why your teacher would say that to you, but I can tell you it's not true. What is true though is that you
must work hard to get into med, getting through HSFY (and presumably OLY1) is not easy - no one gets through without doing work, and as 4ever said, it's definitely not easy, but definitely doable (for the majority of people).
Also, I would once again like to say something about critical thinking. I know it isn't realistic to expect you to understand, and I myself didn't fully appreciate it until epidemiology, but you can't just let any odd grown-up shake you up by saying scary things. I grew up being so scared witless about eating "incompatible" things because my mum made a big deal of it, I called her up every time I'm about to eat something until I was, like, 10. Later, with the aid of Google, I found out that many of them were hoaxes blown out of proportion by the media trying to run some juicy news, also, one of them is chemically impossible...
Currently, I'm frequently accused of being disrespectful to elders by my grandparents, because I refuse to bow down to blantantly unscientific advice that has the potential to do more harm than good, and I refuse to allow more harm to be done by bad advice. So here I am, refusing to let your teacher break you.
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You guys are on holidays now yes? [/offtopic]