Almost everything is a chain
This causes this, which causes this, which is why that happens. Once you have the chain, the terminology becomes labels for steps you already understand rather than arbitrary syllables you are trying to hold. And exam questions — which overwhelmingly take the form 'what happens if you break step three' — become derivable rather than recallable.
So for every process, keep asking why until you reach something genuinely arbitrary. The arbitrary residue is much smaller than the textbook makes it look.
Diagrams are the content, not decoration
Pathways, cycles, cross-sections, phylogenies — the figure usually *is* the material, and the paragraph is a description of it. Reproduce the diagram from a blank page; that is dual coding plus retrieval, in the format the exam uses.
The residue that must be memorised
- Names of enzymes, hormones, structures. No mechanism tells you what something is called.
- Numbers — ATP yields, chromosome counts, the specifics your course expects.
- The exceptions, which are the most examined facts in biology precisely because they punish pattern-matching.
That's a volume problem. Card it and space it, built from your own lecture material so it carries your syllabus's emphasis rather than a textbook's.