I wonder if they took photos of the test booklets during their breaks? Since the quality of the scans are so bad. But then how did they get copies of the answer sheets?

Oh yeah, memorizing stuff from a list to pass a test is definitely not the best way to study. It's what you do to cram. And I agree that you need to learn things over time to really know them. Learning sixty words a day was WAY faster than my optimal pace, and I know that most of those words haven't truly sunk in yet. I'm not even close to being able to use most of them in conversation. I've got baseline recognition, and that's it. But I'll be able to build on that, and it's all I needed for the JLPT.

I mainly only play games/read manga in Japanese if it's something I kind of already know the story for. I should probably shoot a little higher now though. :)