This is a concept that I struggle with in the CCNA 2 class and plan to take the CCENT in a few weeks. I had Packet Tracer labs where there was a stub net and one lab would want you to use the IP address of the next hop router that's directly connected and another lab would want you to use an exit interface instead.

I understand exit interface is layer 2 and next hop IP is layer 3. At the moment I don't understand why you would use one over the other. To what I understand next hop IP is usually the way to go for performance. Without using an example that's 3 paragraphs long lets say we have 3 LANs connected to 3 different routers, ROUTER1 and ROUTER3 are both directly connected to ROUTER2. Each LAN has a different network id.

For all I know I might be over thinking things or the Net Academy material is over complicating things to where I don't understand it from the other sources I've been studying it from.

Thank you for your time :D