Students care about grades more than anything. If your assessments perfectly mirror your deepest goals, their obsession with a high GPA naturally forces them into deep, meaningful studying.
“From our students’ point of view, the assessment always defines the actual curriculum” (Ramsden, 2003).
“In an aligned system of instruction… if students focus on the assessment, they will be learning what the objectives say they should be learning” (Biggs, 2012).
References
Biggs, J. (2012). What the Student Does: Teaching for Enhanced Learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(1), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2012.642839
Ramsden, P. (2003). Approaches to Learning. In Learning to Teach in Higher Education (2nd ed., pp. 39–61). Routledge.