Ok......

It's the reason I failed a few tests at school, because I used built-in functions (or readily available ones coming with common libraries) instead of writing my own...
We had to make a little blog using a mysql database and php...
all my classmates had sites filled with sqli's but I failed because I used Propel2...

You don't do those exercises to solve a non-existing problem, but to grasp concepts.

It's like people doing math, who choose some solution they are familiar with, but not the one asked by their lecturer. Then they proceed to not get points and tell themselves afterwards, that they are "a problem solver" and think what they did was underappreciated genius, while it very much wasn't.

Our company makes people implement binary search in C, on fucking paper.

@Maer tbf, programmers are mostly problem solvers...

What often the result is of what teachers and lecturers want, is that the code is sloppy af.

Like I said, I wrote my blog using Propel2 instead of using the mysqli the rest uses.
I wrote code that was safe and pretty efficient but scored a 1 vs the blog of a class mate which got an 8 but I exploited the cap out off within mere seconds.

@FinlayDaG33k Sure. Next time in a machine learning exam I will not implement a manual solution backpropagating and manually updating neural network weights to learn an exponential function, but rather just use any of the many frameworks available.

Because that very important (/s) problem hadn't been already solved a hundred times over, which by the way applies to pretty much all exam problems ever.

No. The goal of lectures is to make you familiar with a specific concept, not to solve a problem that is already solved.

Your classmates are not going to implement solutions from scratch, like exams ask, likely in the industry their solution will be similar to what you did.

However they showed in the exam that they understood the concept and you failed to do so. Everything else about "I am a problem solver" is just people making themselves feel better.

Lectures are on concepts. Industry experience is for frameworks, APIs, languages. You need both.

@Maer I'm sorry, but I don't see how making a shitty and insecure blog that can get pwned within mere seconds is better than having a proper implementation?

I did everything that got asked from us: build a website using php and mysql.
They didn't specify anything else.
No "use library X" or "build it 100% from scratch".

Of course, after I recieved my grade, I made a dispute and asked another teacher to grade my work and I got a 10 as if it was nothing.

It kept going a while like this and at some point I decided to go mostly towards the more "basic stuff", no "unspecified" libraries.
Still got a failing grade every single assignment.
After talking to the second teacher we found out that it was just the first teachers lack of understanding for my (pretty well documented) code, not me not grasping the concepts.

Soon after, that teach had to teach the class two years lower.

@FinlayDaG33k There can always be individual cases. I used to have a prof whose grading depended completely on his mood. Did not even bother to justify, just told us that grades are fixed and that is that.

That, however, does in no way justify the typical problem-solver-argument you find all over devrant or among students after any exam. This is especially highlighted in the opening post.

@FinlayDaG33k To break it down a bit more:

The argument is usually, "I solved the problem which was the goal of this exercise". That is usually not true for interview questions or exams. The goal of the exercise is to see if one understands a concept X.

@Maer Well, I think that we are foremost problem solvers.
We get presented a problem and we attempt to solve it.
Though yes, a lot of people do use that as an excuse for everything.

if the question is to write code to solve an algorithmic problem, then writing the code to solve that problem is the actual problem you're trying to solve (I hope that made sense?).

In my case, the "problem" was building a blog.
My answer on that was a blog for which I did use Propel2 (along with some front-end stuff like Bootstrap 3 and jQuery).
If, for example, the question was to test my knowledge on the MySQL dialect, then sure, my solution was wrong, but it wasn't, it was a test on my knowledge on designing a database and retrieve datasets from it using PHP.

when it comes to excersises:
Using libraries: fine.
Using libraries to solve the actual problem: not fine.

It's like testing your navigation skills on the road.
Using a map? fine.
Using a navigator that tells you exactly where to go? not fine.