The courses students experience first in higher education can set the stage for their future understanding of the subject matter and their choice between a surface or deep approach to learning. Building a good foundation in these areas early on is vital. In this work we study how students learn new problems depending on their learning approach, by focusing on first-semester student performance in linear algebra exams with a newly introduced problem type. We find that by providing prior exams, performance on new problems quickly increases before saturating at a high level. This performance improvement is especially evident for students following a deep approach to learning. While this can suggest that students objectively understand the given sub-topic better, the access to prior exams can also promote a shallow learning approach in a memorization-based examination.
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