Short answer: almost nobody who got in regrets not memorising more. The regrets are about how they spent the year: fearing the wrong paper, confusing hours with progress, and cutting out everything that kept them functioning.
1. Being scared of population health for no reason
The most common regret, and the most avoidable. POPH192 gets talked about as the paper that will end you, and that reputation is handed down rather than earned. Believing it means you spend a semester anxious about a paper that is genuinely doable and, for anyone heading into a health profession, genuinely worth caring about.
The regret is not the mark. It is the wasted fear, and having nearly missed the point of a paper about how to treat people rather than diseases.
2. Measuring study in hours instead of quality
This one is brutal because it feels virtuous while you are doing it. You sit down for eight hours, you feel productive, and you retain very little because you never connected anything.
Long hours of passive review, rereading slides, recopying notes, produce a strong feeling of familiarity and weak actual recall. Students doing this genuinely believe they are working hard, because they are. They are just working in a way that does not stick.
The fix is to make study active: close the notes and reproduce the thing, work questions before you look at answers, and force yourself to link ideas together instead of collecting them separately.
3. Cutting out the gym, walks and people
The logic is that every hour at the gym is an hour not studying, so the gym goes. Then the walks go. Then the social life goes, and you end up isolated, which is not a neutral cost.
In hindsight: more gym, more walks, more time with people. Not as a reward for finishing study, but because they are what let you study well at all. Isolation makes a hard year harder and does not buy you the marks you think it does.
4. Not learning how to study until it was too late
This is the biggest one, and it is not really the student's fault. NCEA does not demand a serious study method. Then you get launched into a cohort of over two thousand people competing for a small number of places, and suddenly method matters enormously.
What makes it worse is that the starting line is not even. In that cohort there are students repeating HSFY, and students who are halfway through a physiology degree and know a chunk of the content already. That is not fair, and pretending it is does not help.
The trap is that people respond by working harder with the same broken method, hit a ceiling, and conclude they are not smart enough. They usually are. They are just stuck in a rut and nobody told them the rut was the problem.
The one thing to take from this
Fix your method in the first few weeks, not in the last few. Everything else on this list gets easier once your study actually works, because you stop needing the eight-hour days that crowded out your health and your friends in the first place.
If you want practice that forces active recall rather than passive review, start with a paper on Cutline, free with no card.
