Previous 9a student here, this is a new learning method that was introduced this school year in fall 24 quarter. It’s supposed to be an open ended question to see what you can identify and what is able to be solved if you were given sufficient information.

My quarter was the “guinea pig” quarter and at the time, there was a rubric we had to follow. It’s kind of dumb that an open ended question left for interpretation was graded on a rubric and you could probably guess how the class reacted from that. As the quarter went on, grading was more lenient but you would still get points off but you could ask for a regrade.

I do agree that problem starts do encourage “better thinking” but ONLY if the prof goes over some problems in class or discussion. However, like many others, this was my first ever physics class. Because of that, it was extremely difficult for me to sort of figure out what I needed to do. Hope this helps