There are students who don’t study, many students who just read the chapter, just enough to say ” I studied for the test”, and there are those students who study the whole week before an exam.
Of course, there is a difference between reading the class assignment and actually studying it.
Reading it doesn’t imply understanding it, nor does it imply taking the time to remember what you just read.
Reading your assignment is, in fact, just like reading a book.
Concentrating on it just enough to follow the story, but it happens that if your mind wanders off and if you don’t read the sentence again, you won’t even know what it was about, even less will you remember it a week later.
As for studying an assignment, you have to not only read it, but think about it and take the time to assimilate each fact in order to remember it.
Some will like to highlight the most important lines, others will like to write down each fact many times in a chronological way (depending on the subject) and some may want to read it many times and repeat it by heart until they know the exact lines of each fact. It depends on the student and their favorite (or the most effective) way of studying.
Understanding an assignment is a lot harder than reading it. You need to assimilate it to be able to answer questions on it.
It’s just like the difference between reading a book and understanding it: once you’ve read a book, you might be able to explain the main plot to someone else, but it will have many flaws.
If you studied it and understood it thoroughly, you would be able to explain not only the plot, but also the goals and the problems they encountered, the how and the why of how everything happens. And this is exactly what a teacher would ask you to do in an exam: explain, analyze, explain a little more and make your own conclusions about the subject.
To conclude, the differences between reading the assignment and understanding it are simple:
Reading will give you just enough knowledge to answer the main questions and to pass the test (sometimes with the lowest passing grade possible), while studying it will make you ready to answer any and every question on the sheet because you will have analyzed it and thought about it thoroughly before they ask you to do so.