[pnathan]

Some things you wind up needing to memorize. There's no real way around it. Things like the laws of algebra. Other things simply get ingrained in you by long practice. Still others you can derive by understanding the nature of the system and how to put the math together to solve the problem. If someone doesn't really understand how things work - something that is usually a combination of student + teacher - the simplest way to pass is to memorize. If you aren't interested in the why's of things - many undergraduate engineers aren't and don't have time to be - memorization is a natural response to math.

It turns out you can write tests to check for memorizing tricks though. Given a certain mathematical pattern, a certain trick solves it. That is how I remember the GRE as being. I found it a truly atrocious metric.