This is pretty common in education, at least in the teacher circles I've known. I know in Germany, they talk about the "Anforderungsbereiche", or requirement le

This is pretty common in education, at least in the teacher circles I've known. I know in Germany, they talk about the "Anforderungsbereiche", or requirement levels, where the first level is being able to repeat facts, do calculations, etc; the second level is understanding when you apply those facts or formulas; and the third level is understanding why those formulas work, or being able to escalate why some knowledge is relevant to a subject. I would understand the third level (possibly even the second level) as including that ability to apply knowledge in nonstandard contexts that the previous poster was talking about - being able to see not just how to perform a calculation, and how to use it in a given context, but also how to create that context when necessary - seeing that the question on how humans move in groups could be modelled as a fluid dynamics problem, for example. The general wisdom amongst teachers is that most exams should be able to differentiate between these three levels of understanding, so you want questions where the student can just follow the line and do the right thing, but also questions where they're being asked to apply knowledge in different contexts, prove why something is true, or explain why some fact is valuable or relevant in a given context. This isn't about grading on a curve, it's about differentiating between how far different students have come in their understanding. (And the corollary if that differentiation is that if all the students have the same understanding, it's likely that the course wasn't challenging enough, and many of the more advanced students could have been pushed more.) That said, these regions are more about assessment in general than specific written exams, and the third level will be easier to test in some exam formats than others - a multiple choice exam leaves little opportunity to demonstrate that understanding, whereas an oral exam allows the examiner to explore the subject a bit more deeply. I studied in the UK where a single end-of-unit written exam is mostly the norm, and so these exams had to test all the different levels of knowledge, but if you're gathering results over the course of a year or semester, that might look differently.