In my studies, we had a couple of courses on project models and the business end of things etc. The exam materials consisted of several pdfs and/or powerpoints. The exams were remote and not monitored.
Technically it was pretty easy to use the materials on the exams, but this was limited by setting pretty short time limits on these tests. So you’d have to know the answers instead of going through the materials in several different files. Or that was the idea.
My solution was to build a desktop application that parsed through pdfs and powerpoints in a given folder and presented all these pages in a zoomed out view. You could click and open the pages for closer view, etc. The juice was that you could feed keywords to a search and it’d show all pages where the keywords hit. So I could open up all the materials at the same time, write a keyword from the exam question and look through the relevant pages.
Admittedly this didn’t teach me that much about the actual subject, but I think it was a net-positive by coming out as a better programmer.
If a professor can inspire you to actively seek alternatives and/or think outside the box, I consider that a win.