New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How to focus on learning instead of just finishing tasks in university?

Ask HN: How to focus on learning instead of just finishing tasks in university?
2 by tripdout | 4 comments on Hacker News.
I often find that, instead of actually understanding concepts that are taught in university, I only know enough to complete the assigned work or solve the questions on the exam. In other words, I know what to do in order to solve the types of questions we're going to have to solve in an exam, but I don't have a real, longer-term understanding of the concepts (or even much of an understanding at all when it's possible to follow steps to solve certain types of problems). This is coming from a CS degree that teaches a lot of theoretical math concepts. Even for questions where you have to prove something, I often just understand what the proof should look like and what it should include, but I sometimes don't truly 'get' it. It's also hard to find time to do deeper investigations into concepts when that time spent isn't going to increase my grade and will take away from understanding how to solve problems for other courses. Does anyone have suggestions for learning things on a deeper level as opposed to just enough to complete an assignment/exam?