Memorising vs Understanding for as bio

If you look at the five mark questions is 100% memorizing textbook paragraphs, the majority of the paper is more practical kind of questions. So i kind of get a little confused as to when I revise a topic if i should just be robotically drilling into my head or just geniuenly visualizing and trying to understand it. tbh i think there is a big difference between memorizing and understanding, for example, I can quote everything written in the textbook about the heart word for word, and yet if you asked me to label a heart i properly wouldn't know anything

So just generally how do you go about revising cause i think i need to shake mine up

thanks

Speaking as someone who is currently on a Human Biology degree after getting 3 A*s in my A Levels, I have to say different topics in biology require a different mix of memory and understanding.

Some things lend themselves to pure memory, for example remembering which side of the heart carries oxygenated blood and which carries deoxygenated blood. In situations like these I try and form a pneumonic or some other wacky way of remembering it. In this case, my AS biology teacher told us to remember it as "LORD: Left oxygenated, right deoxygenated".

In other situations, for example the graph of the cardiac cycle representing the pressures in the left ventricle, left atrium and the aorta, while memory is helpful to visualise the graph, there is logic in it as well. I believe you have to remember the points at which the two valves open and close. While you can remember these come at the four points of intersection, its also pretty obvious and logical. If the pressure in the ventricle is higher than the atrium, the mitral (bicuspid) valve separating the atrium and the ventricle will obviously close and so you can work it out yourself once you've memorised the graph.

My top tip, especially for A Levels, is thinking how they can make you apply bits of knowledge to other situations. These days they focus much less on asking you to give definitions and more on experimental approaches. If you remember and UNDERSTAND the logic then this will make it easier and you won't come out of the exam saying "My teacher didn't teach us that" because nobody's teacher did!

The best way, I found, to remember things is by repeatedly writing them out and drawing diagrams (which you're encouraged to at university) as much as you can.