Perhaps your use case can take advantage of section links or block links? For example, you could create a note for your Clinical medicine 1 class and then link to sections in your pathology note like [[pathology##IBDs]]. When you click the link it will bring you right to that section. You can also create a return link with [[Clinical medicine 1]] in you pathology note so there’s a visual that this section is important for that class.
I agree that tags would be difficult to use unless you could create a dataview that collections all the sections into one place.