Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life. In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway. This is

Why should school exams mimic typical scenarios faced in work life. In typical work scenarios you have more than 2 hours to tackle a problem, anyway. This is computer science, and a data structures class to boot. Answering any of the questions required not only a deep understanding of the fundamental principles involved, but analytic skills (both in parsing the problem statement into a set of requirements and to identify problematic edge cases). Any good class will teach more than they could possibly test on in two hours. So the alternative here is to keep students guessing about what will actually be on the exam? That's why, when I was a college instructor, I gave previous exams to my students (also: i thought not doing so would disadvantage less socially connected students; lots of old exams get passed around).