Ouabache said:
Every biology course I have encountered required memorization. Biochem in particular, seemed to have the market cornered on volume of things to memorize. (With lots of kicking and raving, I managed to survive two grad biochem classes). While preparing for those exams, on more than one occasion I recall waking in a sweat, having nightmares about pathways that were so jumbled they made absolutely no sense
Heh heh. I think there's a general problem in the way biochem is taught. At the undergrad level, yeah, it can seem like a lot of memorization when you don't yet have the background to understand the chemistry of it. But it's frustrating that they continue to teach it the same way at the graduate level, when you should be able to expect students to have more background and the ability to understand that there is some method to the madness. Afterall, somebody, or some group of people, worked out how all these pathways work, so there must be a way to understand it without rote memorization. Unfortunately, my experiences with biochem profs has been less than satisfactory as well. It seems like they all teach it the same way; they just don't seem to know any other way. Afterall, I had been memorizing glycolysis and gluconeogenesis pathways since high school freshman biology. Surely by the graduate level there is something more interesting to be taught and learned about it. When I was a post-doc, I decided to sit through a grad level biochem class at that university as well, thinking that seeing how it's taught by faculty at a different university might give me better ideas about it, but it was still the same thing. Can't we at least assume that by the time someone gets to graduate school in biochemistry that they know what the 20 amino acids are and the abbreviations used for them, what a purine and pyrimidine are, the difference between DNA and RNA, the different types of RNA, that DNA is transcribed to RNA and RNA is translated to protein, etc? But yet they go through all of this over and over again as if it's brand new material. It wasn't even new in college Freshman bio, but at least there you can assume some students came from high schools where the science curriculum may have been weak. By the time you're in grad school, you already know "what" happens, you want to know "how and why" does it happen.
A doctor friend of mine expressed a similar experience in Med School, a lot of boring memorization. His BS was in physics and agreed that physics and math emphasize problem solving. He went on to point out, that "memorization" is a lower form of learning.
Unfortunately, it shouldn't be memorization, but that's what the med students make of it. We have a course here that is required both for med students and some of our grad students. It's absolutely amazing how different the two groups' approach to learning is in that course. For the med students, they need a C to pass the course, and for grad students, they need a B to pass, so the standards are already different. But, the med students are content with just a C. They memorize just as much as they need to in order to get a C and are happy with that. The grad students want to understand the material, and whatever their grade, they strive to learn as much as they can of it. There's a lab component, and you should hear the grad students complain when they get stuck with a med student in their lab group.
But there is a lot more that does need to be memorized in your basic biology courses than in your basic physics courses. You also jump right into material that isn't something you've watched happen your whole life. Think about it. When you start out in biology, you learn all about what a cell is and a lot of things that go on inside that cell. You've never seen the inside of a cell growing up. When you start out in physics, you learn things like speed, velocity, acceleration, friction -- things you've experienced every time you've gotten in a car. The forces may be invisible, but you've felt them nonetheless. It makes it easier to understand through a bit of intuition about your experiences rather than something that's entirely new right from the start. How much more difficult would people perceive physics to be if you jumped straight into the material on quantum physics and relativity?
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You can't learn anything without making mistakes first! 
