In grad school, we we required to attend 20 seminars in a semester and submit one page summaries of the material presented. For the first few, I had to take a lot of notes, then use those to construct the full page. But somewhere around the 10th seminar, I found myself taking almost no notes, then writing it all while it was still fresh in my head. This may have been the best, most useful course in the 32 semester unit program, though it was only one point out of 32. Why? I became a good listener, and a concise writer. FWIW. Of course, these exercises may have been more valuable with presenting the summary orally to a small audience and answering questions received, and some programs do that too.

Of course in a more analytical or engineering environment, the problem solving is also critical.