That always struck me as the natural way to compress knowledge for exams. I've got nowhere near the intellect to remember whole derivations and proofs, so I ha

That always struck me as the natural way to compress knowledge for exams. I've got nowhere near the intellect to remember whole derivations and proofs, so I have to boil them down just to have any hope of retaining them. Doesn't always work, though. Turns out that memorizing the form of the Lorentz transformation will allow you to solve arbitrary length contraction / time dilation type problems, but nowhere near as quickly as the physics GRE demands. C'est la vie.