Turn your papers over now...

What's all this fuss about teachers knowing what questions are going to come up in the exams?  Perhaps it's a bit more blatant and more motivated by league tables and such these days, but surely it was ever so?  When you're teaching a wide-ranging subject like history, for example, you absolutely have to know which areas are going to crop up in the exam.  I remember for "O" level history, we studied, among other things, Italian unification (Garibaldi and all that) and that's such an esoteric little area of the overall syllabus that it was clear that our history teacher must have known that there would be a question on that.  I've commented before on the way students these days are taught to pass the exam rather than taught the subject, and I'm not in favour of that, but teachers have always been aware of the particular areas which would be tested.