[lambdatronics]

Spot on! I had the same misconception, but it worked out OK b/c I was motivated at least in part by curiosity. When you're curious, you ask enough questions to get to the edge of knowledge and then pose a novel question. If you enjoy the coursework purely b/c you like having nice tidy answers to everything, being at the edge is uncomfortable & research isn't for you. OTOH, in my PhD coursework, the HW questions were almost always solved ones where we just had to reproduce the steps to get the answer that was included in the question formulation; this burned much of my curiosity out by the time I was done.