There are many disciplines in which students work on effectively distinct projects.
For example, the life-changingly-well-designed newswriting course I took in college assigned every single student a different story to spend several weeks reporting out so that we wouldn't all be out harassing the same poor people for interviews.
Genuinely interested. What was the final like? This seems more in the experimental science (ok, journalism) category. I may have to adjust my thinking to be more expansive and also include things like "vocational".
Grammar and AP style rules, iirc. (I may not. It's been enough years now. I did try and fail to find the syllabus in my box of five-star notebooks. We mostly used reporters notebooks for this class, and I took it over the summer. The materials are probably in a plastic bag somewhere...)