[bugufu8f83]

Just because those things don't contribute to your final grade doesn't mean you don't do them.

At Oxbridge, for CS we still had lab work. We still had problem sets assigned for CS and for math which were graded. We had one large CS group project in, I want to say, our second year. Humanities students were still assigned essays. It's just that none of this stuff contributed to your final degree classification which was based entirely on your exams (although if you didn't do your CS practicals you wouldn't be allowed to pass).

Obviously Oxbridge isn't exactly representative but certainly my experience showed me that the American style is not the only way of making education work.