saw a 2nd year CS guy run a maze solver (for final exam) with 300 nested if-statements. worked about 50% of the time. so he added another 5000 nested ifs and got it up to 90%. good enough!
In my first CS class, the professor announced an extra credit project due at the end of the semester. It was to create a formatted terminal calendar given a year from user input. I finished it after learning about condition but before I learned about classes... or functions... or loops... or searching the internet... partially. I searched how leap years worked, but didn't bother to search for code (Stack Overflow didn't exist yet)
Anyway, long ass program with each month hard-coded with 7 possible calendars for each month depending on the first day of the week. Lots of copy and paste. Professor was speechless, but accepted it.