0 On trick questions

Sometimes prattling on about things I'm passionate about, like balloons in a bottle, is like chatting about my fantastic rubber band collection.  
You have been warned.

The new AP Biology exam requires thinking, requires it, and not much else. The sample questions are thoughtful, dense with information, and ask for reasonable conclusions.

It no longer is (if it ever was) a cram and dump course.

And never before have I been swamped with so many accusations that my tests have "trick questions" for questions that are just basic questions of understanding.

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There's a chasm of difference between "heat" and "temperature," and  if you know the difference, it's very easy to get that while a cup of hot tea has a higher temperature than the ocean, the ocean has vastly more heat.

You can slog your way through definitions or equations to get there, but once you own the concepts of heat and temperature, the distinction is as obvious as a bow tie on a banana. Any question about comparing heat in a cup of tea and the ocean becomes embarassingly simple.

Or embarrassingly tricky.

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Here's one from the practice exam:

Simple cuboidal epithelial cells line the ducts of certain human exocrine glands. Various materials are transported into or out of the cells by diffusion. (The formula for the surface area of a cube is 6 × S², and the formula for the volume of a cube is S³, where S = the length of a side of the cube.) Which of the following cube-shaped cells would be most efficient in removing waste by diffusion?

There are several ways to get this, perhaps the easiest just realizing it takes 8 of the choice A boxes to make the volume of 1 choice B box, obvious to some on first blush.

How does something like that even become tricky?
What happens along the way that bright kids doubt their own ability to think?