Has the internet made us worse students?

Since we've been college students, we have all encountered the stress and difficulty of homework, studying, exams, and the learning process in general. These are hardships that have been married to the college educational experience since the beginning of higher education, and time after time students have bested these beasts and finished school as educated and qualified degree-holders. However, with the recent (in terms of how long higher education has existed) advent/expansion of the internet, I believe that we have all come to experience something that is potentially changing the caliber of students that are graduating college: the answers are usually online.

Prior to modern technology, students needed to study exclusively via books, their professors, and their fellow students, in order to master the material that was presented with them. As a result of this tremendous effort put forth in order to fully absorb and understand the material, a person graduating with a degree was (likely) extremely qualified and well versed in most if not all areas of his field. But nowadays with the wealth of information available on the internet, it has become very easy to be lazy when it comes to studying, learning, doing homework, etc. because the information and theories are presented in a very barebones, condensed format, and often times solutions to problems are easily accessed as well. This access to homework solutions and summarized theory can negatively affect the way that we study, and could easily cause us to less-fully master all of the material that we are tasked with mastering. And this applies not only to STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) students (whose courses/homework are more centered on solving problems that have a specific answer, e.g. we've all used Chegg to find an answer to our dynamics homework or looked online to see if anybody has coded and posted a solution similar to our homework) but to soft science and humanities students as well. For example, it is incredibly easy for a philosophy major to find a watered down summary of Kantian ethics, or a historian to find an article of similar quality pertaining, perhaps something like the economic climate of the early Thirteen Colonies and how it shaped the Revolution.

Granted, some solutions and summaries are often posted by professors or other people who have taken the course (e.g. Chegg) in order to guide a student who may be struggling with an assignment, but the intention is that these resources will be used as a guide to a legitimate understanding of the material: a new study tool, if you will. But too often they are used solely as a end instead of a means, and this causes us to lose step with the mastery that we are supposed to be building. So, the problem with finding these solutions/oversimplified summaries is that they do not always lead to a genuine understanding (and sometimes they're just wrong...).

Now, I'm not saying that I don't like that these resources are available to us. Quite the contrary, actually. I do all of this stuff too, but I like to think that I try to learn from it. I am saying that  there is a possibility that abusing these resources could lead to us graduating as less-qualified degree-holders than our counterparts who studied before the period of the modern internet.

(It is also worth noting that while these resources can help get you through studying/homework, they won't necessarily help you with exams, so the line between students who genuinely understand the material and students who live off of Chegg and Google will not necessarily be significantly blurred).