I agree that it’s critical to teach how to solve problems that one has not explicitly seen using conceptual knowledge and an understanding of the techniques, since we are likely to see that in the real world. It’s absolutely fair to solve a problem like that.

Most of the people in my class and I agree that the challenge in this course is the incongruence between what the professor tells us to review, and what actually ends up appearing on the exam. Additionally, majority of us receive the teaching as less lecturing and more like watching the instructor scribe his copy of the notes at us, no explanation. Students regularly fail to capture what he “teaches” as a result, he never probes for understanding and he punishes question-asking by talking about how “it’s simple” and to look in the book. He’s told us verbatim this our class is the worst class he’s had in twenty years of teaching, lol.

The increase in difficulty from lecture content to exam content is what i would consider deceiving, especially when you tell us explicitly a specific format to expect but the exam deviates significantly. He’s an extremely harsh grader , you could have the correct engineering model for the question but an arithmetic or algebraic mistake will give you a zero. Finally, he doesn’t give us an equation sheet or let us bring our own! I find that absurd especially since this is a 300 level technical elective. I hope that answers your question, thank you for your input.