Teaching them about einstellung was their warning. They were all smart enough to reverse engineer an answer when given a textbook. All I did was explain to them that without actually doing the work, they weren’t building the neural framework that would allow them to recall and do the work on their own on quizzes and tests.
They took the test in my class with no book, no device, and no phones. That first test taught most of them that einstellung was real and they weren’t immune, no matter how smart everyone had been telling them they were since kindergarten. They had to do the work or they wouldn’t be able to do it under testing conditions which mimicked the conditions under which they’d take the AP exam.
The ones who took that lesson to heart ended up with Bs and As in my class. The ones who continued to take the shortcut ended up with Ds and Fs.