The courses students experience first in higher education can set the stage for their future subject matter understanding and their choice between a surface or deep approach to learning. Therefore building a good foundation in those two areas early on is vital. Here we focus on first- semester student performance in linear algebra exams with a newly introduced problem type. We find that by providing prior exams, student performance on newly introduced problems quickly saturates at a high level. This performance improvement is especially the case 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 promotes a shallow learning approach in a recipe-memorization-based examination.
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