I agree as a generalization, but that does presume that the syllabus itself doesn't need rote interpretation.

  “No, we haven’t learned about some of the vectors yet, so for the sake of the problem, we just take this one out,”

Many many students self-combust when faced with garbage worded questions because they never learnt how to deconstruct them in class. When questions come with spelling errors and ambiguous variables it's tough.