yes, yes. i complain mightily about this every time i have an exam.
sofficat makes some excellent points. i've discussed this with my 2nd year anatomy prof (i now work for him), and the idea is that you learn it now, so when you go back to it, you're just revising.
i've been struggling with this all year - pharmacology, pathology, nutrition, microbiology and parasitology. all are very heavy rote learning units. i decried the justice in memorising 195 species of bacteria, their staining and morphological characteristics, biochemical properties and metabolism, pathology, etc., etc. same with parasitology. too much!
but if i weren't "forced" to memorise it, i would prob'ly never look at it. and i remember way more than i think i will when it comes to the exam. i don't remember everything, and i know i won't, but i knew it and understood it at one point.
some things, however, i think are important to know off the top of your head, depending on circumstances. drugs are one of those things. in an emergency, you don't have time to "look it up." and you never quite know when you'll see an emergency. i hold onto the belief that i'll get a better understanding of the drugs as i see them in 4th and 5th year clinics, and i'll remember the ones that are most important because i've seen and used them in practice. i hope... by the way, isn't it only the trade names that change, while the chemical names remain consistent? we were advised to learn the chemical names eg amoxicillin-clavulanic acid vs. clavamox, or clavulox.
with the enzymes, i was lucky - we had a lot of rote learning, too, but the lecturer would always ask us, "why does that make sense." this was in my first year here, and i've carried it with me since. no matter what the subject is, i'm always asking, "why does that make sense." sometimes processes seem random, sometimes they don't know. but it helps me organise the material a bit better.
as for the schools having things figured out... maybe. maybe not. is there a better way of teaching things? prob'ly. a huge trade-off is lecturer time. we've gone to mostly multiple choice (mc) exams because the lecturers don't have time to mark 110 short answer/essay exams. but i find that i can skip through a mc exam without REALLY understanding the material. now, if i were expected to write out an essay about acute inflammation, you better believe i'd have a better understanding of the material.
i would like to see more practical hands-on things. i hate, hate, hate learning pathology from 2-dimensional photos. i can't change the view, i can't touch it, smell it, squeeze it, contort it. useless. especially if the photos are bad. get me into a post-mortem and have me cut some things up and see them first-hand. that's how i'll remember things. show me a video of the flare and wheal - i find explanations in textbooks lacking.
most importantly, give me a marking guide for my assignments and exams right after i submit them. there's so much learning lost here with a month delay between submission and feedback, and sometimes the feedback isn't that helpful. without a marking guide, i lose out on some of that learning (unless i'm willing to follow my lecturers around like a puppy dog asking question after question, which i'm not.)
one thing they like to do here is examine us on skills we haven't practised. for example, our path lecturer said on friday that the exam will push us to integrate all the concepts we've learned all semester. that's great. but we haven't had any pracs or assignments to practice this. exam time is a poor time to get assessed on something you haven't done.
i would put more emphasis on learning the material throughout the semester. it's important to know stuff at the end of the semester, but i think 80-100% final marks on the final exam is unnecessary.
all these things take time and planning. maybe they're realistic, maybe not. but they would all enhance my learning immensely.
but, yeah, rote learning sucks.
