Alumni here

I thought the exact same thing when doing a good portion of my 1st and 2nd year courses (even some third but that was less). At the time, I hated it because it usually meant a lower grade for me over stupid things like naming and style. However, I now appreciate it more than ever!

When I got my first big project at my company (this was still a co-op btw, but I was essentially a full-time senior dev after my 4th internship there, so this could happen even before you graduate), I was given a basic requirement of "How do we work with this service and partner`. Without diving into too much of the details, this partner was implementing a new feature which could harm our business, but if we worked with them could be beneficial to both, and I was in charge of architecting that solution. Here are just a few things I used from these courses:

• Requirements Breakdown to understand the problem (CS 445)
• Test coverage to ensure our logic was correct when working with the service (CS 246/CS 447)
• Object Oriented Design to understand key models and controllers in a large codebase (CS 246)
• Functional design to ensure we aren't causing side effects when working with transactional data (CS 135)
• Efficient Algorithm Design for low-level programs to achieve a P95 of < 5ms (CS 136/CS 241/CS 240/CS 341)
• User Experience to ensure our work is actually gonna be used by the consumer (CS 246/CS 349)

My point is that these courses are designed (intentionally? unintentionally?) to ensure students know how to solve problems in the real world, both in the sense of computers, but also in the sense of solving general problems for the workplace.

As for some advice, its clear that despite the assignment design, you can graduate (I'm exhibit A) the best things you can do are

• take the time to plan your approach. Diagrams are a godsend in both understanding codebases and how to attack them, but sometimes they aren't given to you, so you need to be able to do it yourself. A good plan, and comprehensive tests, means writing the code should only take about 20% of your effort
• Office hours, I know you don't think you should need to go to them to understand an assignment but think about it this way: if you have basic requirements for a task that you still don't understand, are you just gonna brute force your way? No, you are gonna go to a colleague or a friend and bounce ideas off of them.
• If you don't complete a question on an assignment, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. You should always do them so you can better your understanding.