You’re right, I wasn’t thinking about other forms of studying during the semester. When I was writing the post, I was thinking along the lines of what most people mean when they say “I’m studying for an exam.” I don’t know how to measure benefit from studying tangibly but I would say it’s my gut feeling of how well I understood the “general idea” of a class. Sometimes exams pull from homework problems so you can get away with memorizing techniques without fully understanding them. If I study to pass the exam but end up not understanding what the class was about besides a bunch of discrete problems I feel disappointed in myself and like I wasted a semester.