At my school we wrote a part of a model checker (in C, with pthreads) for concurrency, the rest of the assignments were (as I recall) a mix of questions and math proofs, so you either got it, or got to redo the questions.

In general I only recall writing one simple essay and it was, indeed, for our completely fluff project planning class, which was almost entirely about the instructors homegrown, mostly bullshit agile-like system.