What ginko said. Engineers don't memorize formulas, we're taught to recognize the principles underlying problems, and then looking up the appropriate formula to

What ginko said. Engineers don't memorize formulas, we're taught to recognize the principles underlying problems, and then looking up the appropriate formula to address the problem. In high school all I did was rote memorization and I coasted through; I tried that approach during my first two years at MIT and struggled hard. Only after I finally realized that problem-solving was not the same as memorization did I start to "get it." In fact, most of my college exams, as well as my Engineer-in-Training and Professional Engineering exams were open book/open note.