Yep, but if I just let the system get all the memory back, valgrind would have yelled at us for leaking memory, and it would have been detected by the testing s

Yep, but if I just let the system get all the memory back, valgrind would have yelled at us for leaking memory, and it would have been detected by the testing system, slapping us in the face with a malus on our final grade.