I'll just go through the homework problems and hope it's enough . You can often hear conversations like that in the student lounge, and if you step across the hall to the faculty lounge you'll hear their counterparts. The average on my last test was 47 and some of them went to the department head to complain that I was testing them on things I never taught them, even though the chapter we just covered gives them everything they needed to know. Things are clearly not going quite the way either group would like. Many students believe that their primary task in a course is to guess what their professors want them to know, and if they guess wrong they resent the professors for being unreasonably demanding, tricky, or obscure.
Professors then conclude that the students are unmotivated, lazy, or just plain dumb.
There is another way things can go. Suppose you give your students a detailed outline of the kinds of problems you would be calling on them to solve, including some that require real understanding, and then ask them to solve such problems on homework assignments and tests. It is neither. It is successful teaching. An effective way to prepare students for the imminent possibility of having to think is by giving them instructional objectives, statements of specific observable actions that the students should be able to perform if they have mastered the course material.