Interestingly enough, I think my degree does the opposite. The first year was very much “pass these exams, here, this is what you’ll need to know”, and a lot of the papers were part multiple choice.

However, in my final year, we’re actually taught comparitively very little. That is to say, we receive the same volume of information per module as we did in the first year, but as there are fewer modules and they’re weighted higher, we’re expected to do an increasing amount of work ourselves, making it our fault if we perform poorly.

I imagine this is in no small way due to the fact that science graduates are “expected” to go on to research, where it is necessary to think for ones self, remember a wide range of things and apply them to previously unseen things.

:S