There are lectures. About four hours a week of them. The school just has a tongue in cheek policy about not calling them that. They range from your standard professor talking in the front of a lecture hall to a professor lecturing to tables of 6-8 students and then having the groups work on some question/task for a portion of the time. The goal is for all of the lectures to be "interactive" and this is accomplished to varying degrees of success. Sometimes the interactivity amounts to cold calling, sometimes it involves giving the groups multiple choice tests that they go over as a group and then present their reasoning to the class.
We have tests at the end of every course -which means every 11 weeks and they are pass/fail. The weekly short answers are not graded.
As for how the basic sciences are taught, there is a focus on teaching the basic sciences in the context of clinical practice using cases. The best way to understand would be to just take a look at a case we are working on (when you interview or visit for second look i'm sure any student you run into would be happy to show you one), but it boils down to instead of being given a chapter on diabetes to read, you are given a clinical vignette describing someone who has a constellation of symptoms, goes to the doctor, gets some tests and then is told they have diabetes and is given some treatment. So you go read a chapter on diabetes, you figure out how whatever went wrong usually works, you figure out what the tests mean, and what the treatment was and why it was given. Then you meet with your group and discuss. The idea is that everyone will approach it from a slightly different angle, and that if someone didn't understand some part of it, someone who did will explain it to them. And that by seeking out the answers on your own, and linking it to a clinical scenario, you will retain the information better then being given a list of symptoms, a powerpoint on the pathways, and then six months later a class on the drugs used. The cases are six hours per week of in-class time (for two cases)