text: It's not only true that allowing students to lead their own projects would be better for their summer liberty, but doing so would also increase the quality of the work they submit overall. The undeniable truth is that students have constant unmitigated access to all the information online they could hope to find; and while pulling from web sources can be a solid way to find information, when a project is heavily reliant on it, the student doesn't have to do much "learning" at all. If a student is assigned a topic they can't stand, they're far less likely to invest their time into committing the research to memory. When they have the freedom to pick something they're passionate about, however, there's a greater probability they'll put their effort into producing a paper that they and their teachers can actually be proud of.