Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants, you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you As. Originality, on the other hand, could get you anything - from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.
Surely enough, I can manage to be extremely original by pasting a hash of my penis length onto the page. That doesn't mean that I'm useful to anyone, though.