If you can only repeat the teacher’s words, you memorized it. If you can use your own, you learned it.

Memorizing hands you the shape of an idea without the inside of it. Repeating the exact phrasing proves you held some words in place, which is a different skill from understanding, and it collapses the moment somebody asks the question a slightly different way. Your own words only arrive once you know what the thing actually is.

Test yourself before the exam by closing the notes and explaining a topic in sentences nobody taught you. Wherever only the textbook phrasing comes out, that is the part to go back to. It takes ten minutes and tells you more than rereading the chapter.