Students early in their intellectual journey think knowledge is absolute and handed down by experts. When you give them ambiguous, real-world tasks, they don’t see it as a chance to grow; they see it as unfair testing or bad teaching.
“Students who define learning as accumulating facts and right answers… take understanding and thinking to mean remembering the thoughts of others. First-year students often talk about understanding and thinking, but many complain: ‘The examples on the test were not discussed in class’” (Erickson et al., 2009).
References
Erickson, B. L., Peters, C. B., & Strommer, D. W. (2009). Knowing, Understanding, Thinking, and Learning How to Learn: The Goals of First-Year Instruction. In Teaching First-Year College Students. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.