Damn it! I wish I still had classes like this! ...I love classes where literally just understanding the material (in a deep, comprehensive way) is enough to get 100% if you don't make stupid mistakes. I suspect this is the reason I did well in high school chemistry, physics, and bio–if you tried to really grasp the underlying concepts, the memorization required was trivial, or at least it didn't feel like memorization.

Whereas many of my classes now are pure memorization of stuff with hardly any underlying logical structure (like pharmacology...stupid list of over 100 drug names to memorize, generic AND commercial!), or based on legal standards and "best practice guidelines" which, although they must be based on research results, don't yield easily to my attempt to find underlying concepts. One class consisted almost entirely of memorizing the names (and acronyms, in French and English) for the various nursing regulatory organization in Ontario, and the documents they released on stuff like ethics. Gaaaah. There have been so many classes where I finished with an A- not because the class was hard, not because an A+ would have been ridiculously difficult, but because the material was so boring that I literally could not make myself study for more than a few minutes at a time, and only then by bribing myself.

Weirdly enough, I probably would have preferred doing pharmacology the hard way, i.e. learning chemistry to an advanced enough level that I could understand approximately how and why different drugs have the effects that they do. This would obviously be harder, but it would also be interesting, which would make it psychologically easier–I spend a lot more willpower on studying boring things than on studying interesting things.