Exam Preparedness

As I do my final preperation for my statistical mechanics final exam, and my worry seems to intensify, a disturbing trend of my classes. Understanding of concepts has become utterly secondary to actually being able to solve specific problem over again, that we have done during the year on assignments.

This is because the set of questions actually askable on an exam has shrunk. In fact, for such things as my astr 402 exam, I studied specifcally 7 questions and memorized those methods. Since I thought that the exam was going to be of the form 8 quesitons, choose 6 to answer. The question space of this exam was actually only about 13 questions (ie. there were only really 13 questions he COULD ask that would be answerable without numerical methods and thus be doable analytically in the time frame of a test.

This has made studying a matter of redoing old assignments and memorizing methods and formulas rather than understanding concepts. I'm wondering if this is a general effect as people specialize more and more into their discpline.