I always believed that if a course assignment needed a student to look up anything online (provided that their background was solid enough), let alone the solut

I always believed that if a course assignment needed a student to look up anything online (provided that their background was solid enough), let alone the solution, this would be something professors would feel moderately self-conscious about. However, I found out the hard way that also in respected universities, the actual assignments in "hard" courses were long-known, extremely challenging problems that were not really meant to be solved at this level, especially on a weekly basis. Folks handing them in were often using solutions that were quite obviously inspired from online sources, if anything because of the weird methodology needed to solve some of them, without the course teams caring at all.