Ha, ha, this has little to do with learning. I effortlessly passed a lot of humanities courses in high-school and college with top grades by simply writing exactly what the teacher wanted to hear, unrelated to what I thought of the topic myself.
You should use the same strategy when you write self- or peer-reviews, pitch decks, submit to a particular conference, … if you want to move fast, use sycophancy to trick the gatekeepers.
So perhaps it was about learning after all, but at the meta level. And who said LLMs do not have sentience when clearly they learned this approach faster than most of us humans.
For example, in one assignment I asked students to imagine themselves as a Gilded Age laborer – they could choose U.S. born, immigrant, or child – and write from that perspective a letter or diary entry that explained their day-to-day life, their challenges, their fears, and their hopes. A few students wrote letters as a child laborer that were truly moving.