I definitely could tell the difference, though most of the time I just studied full 4-7 days before the exam.
It was easy to cheat on the assignments. Working on them in groups was common and sometimes encouraged. The only person you could really cheat was yourself (and a TA who had to grade one more exam)
So that was the justification used to switching to a less impactful final exam.
No idea how true that is.
We were also told learning a phonetic alphabet was better for young children learning to read than using the old ABC system.
As far as I have heard, that turned out to be based on one person's fantasy and zero evidence and has actually had negative impact on children learning to read.
To my knowledge they still teach about audio/visual/kinetic learners and how you should structure the way you learn around which one you are. This has been debunked for decades.
Not just the UK, pedagogy/education is a very soft science, along with any other field that revolves around human behavior (psychology, sociology, etc...).
Using AIs in experiments and studies will be an improvement even if they do not accurately reflect human behavior, just because you don't need a harm review and you can repeat your experiments multiple times under different variables.