A quick story about an incident that happened to a fellow empegger I know:

He was at UT (University of Texas) studying to be an EE. One of his hardware programming classes had a final in which he had to write a four function calculator. He did it and got it completely right. Unfortunately because his "divide" piece wasn't the same as what was in the book he ended up with a 75 on the final (he got 0 credit for that piece). The professor acknowledged that his answer did division correctly, but "it wasn't the answer I was looking for" (the one in the book). Apparently this prof feels engineers don't need to be able to intuitively come up with solutions; regurgitation is what an EE needs on a daily basis. Anyhow, my friend ended up leaving UT over the incident because no one would back him up.