When I did CS (my alma mater didn't have Software engineering at the time,) many courses did similar but with a different spin; The work based on the exercise was pre-divided into modules that were fairly similar in size. And at the end you had to code your module and everything had to 'work together'.

As a blunt observation, the courses where writing a specification was part of the project everything seemed to click together more easily. The ones where a specification wasn't written were the ones where people were scrambling on due date.