Do you really read the whole textbook from A-Z?

[KittenMittens]

I've mostly stopped buying textbooks because I know the chance of me using them is very low and I really don't want to spend money on something I won't use. Instructors who provide detailed PowerPoint slides for every lecture tend to test from their slides. Get one of those teachers and you may not need any textbooks. This won't work with every course. Nor will this work for every student.

My real point is that you should strive to learn efficiently. An instructor should provide a clear list of objectives. Study to the objectives, not to the assigned pages. Your grade is based on how well you know the objectives, not on having read the assigned pages. Reading a textbook is efficient for some people and not for others. If reading textbooks works well for you, keep doing it. If not, start doing something else.

Textbooks are 9/10x good only for reference. They're almost always too dry, too verbose, and make it difficult to explain concepts especially at the undergraduate level. The problem with the TECEPs is that they use a very particular edition of a textbook, and the test makers tend to just take the test questions out of very particular sentences of a particular chapter on a particular page. So if you're willing to read a textbook cover to cover, you can scan it all, and recognize/be familiar that some test question came from some random sentence on some page. Straighterline does the same kind of thing as well.