>> In the real world you don't get punished for using Google or surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you.

In the real world, you are generally working on a problem that has not been solved before, so although you might find a few snippets to learn from, most has to be created from scratch.

To emulate the real world, each student or team has to have its own problem. This is possible (as discussed in the post), but raises the level of effort for the instructor considerably.