On College and Forgetting

Upon entering college, I had presumed that by the time I got out I would have attained such a solid grasp on my field of study that it would be impossible to lose. Well. It's been about 3 years since I graduated, and although I have retained an impressive amount of my acquired knowledge, I came across an item today, while cleaning out a box of papers, that gave me pause. During Winter quarter of my senior year I took a course called Modernity and Its Discontents in the History of Consciousness department. As I'd already had the pleasure of reading a good deal of the material on the syllabus, it was intended as an easy foil to the incredibly difficult Senior Seminar (on Anarchy, no less!) that I was taking the same quarter. A good deal of it would be rehashing and/or narrowing the focus on things I had already learned. I breezed through the course and easily got an A. So today, when I came across the topics list for the final paper for that same course, I was stunned to realize that I can no longer easily provide a lengthy and articulate answer to every one of the proposed topics. They were as follows:

1. Discuss Marx's idea of dialectical materialism.
2. What, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is the legacy of Enlightenment reason?
3. Discuss the relationship between love and aggressivity in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
4. What does Hannah Arendt mean by the phrase 'banality of evil'?
5. Discuss Fanon's reading of Hegel's master-slave conflict in Black Skin, White Masks.

None of these is a tremendously advanced concept in political theory. Not easy, to be certain, but also not unbelievably difficult. Now, I know I could still give a roundabout, stumbling, and wholly unsatisfactory response to any one of these, but... really? Is it really so easy to lose 4 years of excruciatingly hard work? I find this incredibly disheartening and frustrating. Not to mention, it's going to make my graduate school applications a hell of a lot harder. So... I suck.