Comment by saghm

To me, the first paragraph you quoted seems to be describing the modules themselves in the abstract, whereas the latter is about the university testing environment. There are plenty of things that I could do given ample time and the ability to look things up but would struggle to answer detailed questions about in a timed context without any notes or access to the internet. l think it's a fairly well-established concept that actively restating something you already know helps with recall later, like how the act of writing notes is considered to be useful even independent of studying them later. In the outside world, if you already know these concepts, you'll be able to refresh yourself about them easily enough whenever you end up needing to use them, but when you're getting tested in school, you need to do the refresher beforehand, and going through the exercises as they're intended is a pretty reasonable way to do that.