[andrewjw]

These classes often encourage you to collaborate - with others in the class, and also with outside resources. That is: they would encourage you to go read the paper, so long as you cited it as a source and provided a proof in your own words you had reconstructed from memory. The idea is to encourage engagement in the community and teach people to build off of existing results, a skill often overlooked in undergrad where that would have been considered cheating.