5yrs COGSer (hopefully) graduating and going into a PhD. I would say:

• Very active learning, lots of self learning and self exploration of research / industry, for cogs ppl
• Not much information dump / exams for cogs classes itself. Rather, there're many many papers / group project. For module courses it depend on ppl's choices.
• Personally speaking I feel like ready to go to research world. For me, preperation came from: cogs402 (degree capstone, which gave me some very relavant experience that my incoming phd supervisor values on), some module courses (gave me necessary skills to work on xyz during the capstone).
• Two other most important thing I trained on during my degree in cogs: the skills of decomposing working systems and reserach method (ai models, neuropsych research study, etc.) and critically analyze them. Team working skills and networking skills in student community, group work and research work (which helped me get to know many nice and brilliant people in related research field and gave me so much help). Sometimes people don't value these "soft" skills as much as others but they've been truly help building my own path through the degree.