See, what they don’t tell you about serious graduate school programs is the extent to which you are expected to know everything without having been taught it. In undergrad, the professor would only test you on things you covered in class. In grad school, you are lucky if what the professor covers in class is vaguely useful. More than half of what I’ve learned so far has been outside the classroom. This trend will surely continue into the future.

There’s also the little caveat about expectations. Some classes grade homework assignments strictly and care more about answers than methods and effort; some classes don’t even bother to grade homeworks (though if you don’t do them you’re almost guaranteed to fail the exams). Some exams test whether you can regurgitate proofs seen in class, some test mechanical problem solving skills and intuition, and some want you to know damn near everything. Sometimes you may spend more than half of your allotted time on two questions that, you find out after the fact, were only actually worth 18% of the exam grade, and you didn’t get any partial credit on them besides, but that your last five minutes of scribbling on a seemingly unimportant question netted you the majority of your points (a question which, by the way, was worth almost half of the points on the exam). No, you shouldn’t expect all exam questions to be weighted equally, either.

I know how I’m studying for the next round of exams: memorizing proofs, practicing my mechanics, and trying to learn damn near everything. And I am not making any more assumptions about how many points each question is worth.