I guess “how exams are supposed to be done” is a pedagogy question, or “what is the best way to teach?” As I understand it, pedagogy might be more popularly known in Europe and more top-down and behind the scenes in USA.

I don’t know about the current state of pedagogy, but it makes sense to me that you’d want to test something like these categories.

I’ve had plenty of tests though where the type of problems on the exam were the same type we practiced, for the whole test.

From your last example, if you’ve already practiced many examples of [some long text problem] in a common format, it might not be a new context to you.

The middle school/high school tests I was talking about had entirely different kinds of problems we had never seen before, but where if you knew the concepts well, you could make the connection to how to solve them.