I totally agree here. Sometimes I've been frustrated at the lack of flexibility to use assignments in a self-directed way. I like the idea that you should "never waste a good deadline." I've always admired students who find creative ways to learn what they want while still getting credit.

The assignment from which I learned the most and which I had the most fun on was totally open ended other than some general methods.

Good point, otherwise cheating would be a valid strategy (ethics aside).

But cheating is a valid strategy.. Colluding when everyone else is competing is exactly what intelligent people do. Not following the rules because they're stupid is what intelligent people do. It's not mutually exclusive to understand the fundamentals and cheat. The idea that we should compete with our peers for a chance at higher education is like a dystopian hunger games novel.

"Not following the rules because they're stupid is what intelligent people do."

Plenty of smart people follow the rules on principle and plenty of rule-breakers are dumb. Notably, many students who cheat has to cheat, because they are unable to learn underlying material.

It is a valid strategy when you end up learning as much as a person not cheating. But in general, this is not the case because students see cheating as an alternative to hard work.

You can also learn a ton about how to bend rules when cheating, something that's often useful out in the real world. I feel like half of what I learned in school was how to be better at avoiding doing things (including cheating, when applicable).

There's various ways to go about morals in general but "following the rules" in itself is not a good basis for morality.

Not sure about you, but my university was very strict with cheaters because of how widespread cheating was. Gaining an extra 10 points on tough exam wasn't worth the risk of expulsion. I suppose that deciding whether to cheat or not is an optimization problem in and of itself. If no one else is cheating, the gains are huge, but if there are a lot of cheaters, it might not end up being worth the risk.

Actually, there never was a time where I felt that cheating was worth it. On the contrary, the amount of time I'd need to prepare a strategy (compile cheat sheet, figure out how to use it, where to sit, etc.) probably exceeded the time I'd take to just study for the exam!

I agree, always following the rules isn't beneficial to society, but I'd argue it's better than the case where no one is following the rules.

Virtually all my classes in college allowed me to have cheat sheets of varying sizes for exams. Creating that cheat sheet was a good way to focus my studying, to the point where I rarely had to use the cheat sheet.

Cheat sheets were limited to classes that had a lot of memorization, which is rare in EE. Professors usually included an equation sheet with the exam for courses with a shit ton of equations (EMAG, circuits, etc.).

And note that I was talking about a cheat sheet to be used for cheating.