As this was flagged as too broad I have cross posted this on Physics Forums because it seems to rather lead to a discussion instead of a straight answer.
I am a pure physicist (M.Sc.) and on the side I do tutoring. Right now I have medicine students who have to take a physics course as part of their curriculum. Their course consists of one lecture (2 h/week) and a lab course with 10 experiments. The exam in the end are 20 questions where only the answer counts, it's hit or miss. The derivation of the result does not matter at all, there is no partial credit. Also no use of a book of formulas or a calculator.
My feeling is that this form of the exam was chosen after a couple lawsuits. Students used to bring in a hand-written cheat sheet, but that got phased out. Not giving partial credit means that there is no leeway which could be used in a lawsuit against an “unfair” grading. So they are super strict now, at the expense of students who don't sue the university after a failed exam.
There are lots of questions from old exams from the web, students taking the exam have written them down from memory. We have access to these lists and as I myself have had good experience with studying by solving problems, I do the same while tutoring. Letting them solve the problems and talk about the stuff that they had difficulties with, sometimes doing a bit of background.
Some sample questions are:
Give the unit of viscosity in base SI units.
Answer: $\mathrm{kg \, m^{-1} \, s^{-1}}$A bat picks up a moth at a 45° angle on the same height, its ears are 1.41 cm apart. What is the path difference between the sound waves to its ears?
Answer: $1\,\mathrm{cm}$What is the smallest object size that bats can resolve at a speed of sound of $c = 300 \, \mathrm{m\,s^{-1}}$? Hint: What is the highest pitch that one can resolve?
Answer: 15 mmTransition from glass to air, make a sketch of the light ray.
Determine the voltage in an X-ray tube when the limiting wavelength is 15 pm.
Except for the second one where it took me a while to reverse-engineer the question to figure it out, these are all things that I can easily do in my head or with little envelope calculations. But that is likely because I have a solid foundation in mechanics, electromagnetism and geometrical optics from three terms with lectures (2 + 2 h/week) and tutorials (3 h/week) in the bachelor course. Of course there was also theoretical physics and much more, I'm not counting that.
The medicine students go through these topics in a much more superficial fashion, just from lecture time it is a factor 6. Of course they do not need to go as deep, but I feel hard pressed to study physics superficially and still retain some knowledge. I need to connect it with other things, weave a dense mesh of understanding; I cannot do random facts. But they only have one more week before the exam, it is just a side lecture that they will not strictly need any more after it. All they want to do is pass it.
When I tutor I find them struggling with these type of questions as they cannot recall the whole setup of an X-ray tube and the associated equations with that and therefore feel lost with the fifth question. I then go and draw an X-ray tube, go through the steps and make sure that they understand each of them. After that they seem to understand it. But in the next tutoring session virtually everything is lost again because it was not build on a solid foundation. A widespread strategy around medicine students therefore is to learn stuff by heart like “use equation $U = h c / e \lambda$ for the question with the maximum wavelength on the X-ray tube”. It feels wrong to do physics this way, but they are not studying physics.
Given the time constraints and their motivation of just wanting to get over with physics altogether, how can I best teach them such that they get most at least half of the questions right?
