You say that you suffered from it but still got good grades. Did your test performance suffer? If not I fail to see how your resultant level of knowledge was any different. If you felt like you weren’t engaging your brain at all and we’re on autopilot I get that, but that should have resulted in lower test performance. I don’t think anyone expects you to memorize the material you are being tested on, that’s by the point of engineering school. The point is to introduce you to fundamental concepts and practice applying them so that you can use them to trouble shoot real world problems when you will have all your resources available. We don’t make design decisions on the deck plate anymore, safety and work controls have more or less (in the US) developed to make that impossible. Yes, relying on source information may slow you down (and time is money) but the point is we live in a very complex modern world that necessitates getting it 100% right which means checking answers with primary sp Exes and though testing.