She got an A pass in Drama and B passes in History and film studies, none of which require anything more than you mention, IMO.
As a teacher of History at the level that Bea just passed it (albeit in a different country) I can assure you that it isn't just memorising. In fact 'just memorising' will result in a very mediocre mark.
Students are required to analyse the information and support their arguments with relevant historical information which is not just facts but different opinions of different historians, taking into account their particular biases etc. A type of question that students would be asked to write would be: "Evaluate the extent to which Nazi racial policy was responsible for the defeat of Germany in World War II." (This is a question I set my students as a practice question for their upcoming HSC exam. To write a response you would need to discuss the racial policy, the whole range of reasons for the defeat of Germany, the different opinions on that defeat (and their are literally hundreds although students would only need to show an understanding of about three or four differeing opinions - e.g. Soviets won it, lack of resources at home, Americans won it, resistance groups etc - and name the historians who take each view), shoot down the opinions with which the students disagrees and say why backing that opinion up with historical information and other historians opinions as well as make a final judgement as to the extent that racial policy was a cause of the defeat. This is not simply 'memorising' information but applying quite a lot of information to a given question.
In NSW Modern History and Biology are regarded as equally difficult because of the different skills involved. In fact Modern History is seen as one of the hardest subjects due to the in depth level of writing required. To give you an idea, when I did my university degree in History in the 70s I wasn't required to use the skills now required from final year students in NSW and in England for their A - levels (we do have a harder course which is now the level of the honours degrees when I was at uni but that is for the very best students).
To say that History is an easy subject really shows very little understanding of the nature of the course and the exams in this day and age. Dates etc are a very minor part of the course (in fact I tell my students that dates aren't that important at all - I also mark the HSC here and have given full marks on many occasions to students who have the dates wrong but their arguments are so good that that error is ignored.)
I don't know anything about the A - level Drama course, but if it is anything like the NSW Drama course it to requires a lot more than memorising - it requires a lot of analysis of techniques as well. Not to mention the fact that students are required to write lenthgy essays and do dramatic performances which count for a large quantity of the marks.
Film Study is a mandatory part of all of our English syllabi (in NSW at least 2 units of English is mandatory for the HSC) so much so that our students are spending a day at school during the upcoming holidays watching 4 different versions of King Lear so that they can write about the play itself and the different ways of presenting it in their HSC exams in October. They have also seen two stage performances of the play.
The NSW HSC requires students to attempt at least 10 units across at least 4 subjects of which 2 units must be English unlike the English A - level exam but the standards required for each course is similar as the NSW syllabi writers and the English syllabi writers do look at each others syllabi when rewriting their own. Not surprising when you consider that the top bloke in the English education system Ken Boston was the top guy here in NSW for many years.
