if a student is able to study all the content the night before and still get a decent grade compared to long-haul studiers then there's something seriously wrong with the coursework
The coursework has to be calibrated so that an average student can succeed. There will always be students who are smarter than average and can pick up the material much faster, or who have a personal interest in the material and have studied it on their own in the past (e.g., some kids actually like math or science or computers and study these topics extensively outside of school).
Outside of K12 the kids might not be kids. Don't try to lecture me on what happened in 1989-1992 wrt the soviet union, I was there (well, glued to American TV set, not physically in .ru) ... even if the freshmen in the class were not conceived yet and the whole story is news to them.
If I wanted a CS degree I had to sit thru night school "what is an IP address" class even if during the day time I had a fat stack of current Cisco certs.
That was my general method at school. I found it works for most exams as it is pretty well established all the material they might cover and you can read the notes version in a day.
But the irony for me was, as a language and linguistics major, I liked the difficulty of CS because this was not in my grasp.
I ended up in IT, and I routinely tell people how I failed a midterm in Intro to C++, I had to wind out like a 30 line C++ function with arrays and pointers tracing and writing out the correct cout<< output, only in the last five minutes of that midterm realize I made one trivial error like on the third of these thirty steps.
And so a score of 68 it was. But my god did I love Solaris, g++, and the Unix way well after that.
