Kind of an imperfect analogy— when I was in college I had friends who had access to years worth of all the old homeworks for us to go through and copy if we needed it. I always joked that it was way easier to just read the chapter and learn the stuff.

I was only half-joking though. There were a bunch of reasons I found this pointless:

1) the old homeworks were all completely disorganized notes passed on from person to person so it’s not like we could just flip to the same part of another semester in every set of old course materials we had. We had to dig through them to even find the same homework assignment.

2) some professors actually did their jobs and used completely new problems every semester

3) even if we found the same problem, some profs were smart enough to change numbers just enough that it completely changed the way the problem had to be solved. This was especially disastrous because people walked away thinking they’d done everything correctly by just applying the same solution with new numbers.

4) if we did find the same problem, the kid we were copying had to get the question correct or else we couldn’t do much with his/her materials

I took a lot of grief for being a rule follower, but it was legitimately easier to just read a chapter and learn the stuff, than to dig through what could easily be hundreds of pages of misc notes. I guess just having the feeling they were getting away with something motivated my classmates though.