Uh actually it would seem more logical to suggest that 1st year 1st semester is more difficult, in terms of achieving really high scores. The reason being is that by the end of year 12, after exams, you'd be making choices relating to university, work, accodomodation etc thus cutting down on your preparation time for the start of semester. Not to mention other factors, such as 'recovering' from highschool exams and not being accustomed to the pace of university.
On the other hand. By the end of first year university, you would have a pretty good idea as to the teaching/learning/study style of university would you agree? Moreover, you will have had 3 months to prepare for your second year subjects. Now unless the subjects you are taking are all entirely practical and you have absolutely no textbooks or notes to study off then you have can't really say that second year is way more difficult than first year. Considering that 2nd year students are way more familiar with university than first year students, and they get more time to prepare for their subjects.
Look at it this way, do you think someone who aced vector calculus as a first/second year student would have had much difficultly with evaluating a line integral in their exam? Chances are they would've found it to be fairly straight forward. But how do you think they would've handled the same problem as a 5 year old? They wouldn't even be able to start doing the question. The point is, you can't really draw logical conclusions from comparisons between years, especially if the comparisons are supposed to suggest a huge difference in difficulty between different years.
klh - I saw it in highschool but it was only in year 7 and 8. When it got to the stage when scores really mattered, the teachers weren't biased. I mean, how could they be in subjects like maths, english and chemisry? (This is excluding subjects which consist of ridiculous assessment tasks.)
As for the "real world." I really don't see why you decided to bring it up. It started with marks and then an irrelevant thing(the "real world") was brought up? I don't see the relevance. I mean, the discussion wasn't on the topic 'marks vs real life bs...what's more important.' So whether or not the "real world" matters is a side issue at most.
As for marks, we all know that there can never be complete equality in terms of exam preparation and obviously, at least for some people, this will affect their marks. But the fact is that what you, and others see, is the final result. I mean, what are you going to do if say inadequate exam prep affected you before some exams? Request that some extra comments be added to your academic transcript? Something like "Little Johnny was too lazy to study for chem122142141 because he was preoccupied with getting wasted on the weekend before his exam. So even though he got 12/100 for his exam, potential employers should just ignore this and regard it as 100/100 because this is what he would've obtained if he had studied."
natstar - To me preparation encompasses a lot more than simply flicking through a few pages of a textbook. Unless the person is a genius there is no way that someone can understand concepts extremely well without having done many questions. As for whether or not preparation is possible for a subject. I find that for most of the subjects I do, yes it is. Looking at subject descriptions(which include the main topics of the subject) already gives you a pretty good idea as to what is going to be covered. With that out of the way, preparation is cetainly possible, just grab a textbook and plow through some questions.
I realise that most of the subjects I do are not even similar to the ones that you would do. However, I did some accounting in highschool(yes I know its not exactly the same at university level accounting. However most first year accounting subjects I've seen are structured so that even students who haven't done accounting before can take it. So the stuff I've seen in highscool is not totally irrelevant) - and preparation is possible. All of the 'balancing' and basic calculations are just textbook problems which can be done by anyone who wishes to prepare early.
