I find when I fly with people who do checks from memory, they are actually checking things much better than people with a list to follow.
Memory checks flow around the cockpit, covering everything in order. When you are reading checks out, you often lose your place in the list, or read a check but not actually do it.
There are countless times where students, reading from a checklist, are happy to line up for a navigation flight without having set the DI properly, or reading "t's and p's in the green" without actually visually checking this.
If you can cut checks down to what actually needs to be done, and do them from memory, in my opinion this would be safer. From a student point of view, it's more about realising why certain checks need to be done.