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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/39512
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

That's understandable. There's always that tempting desire to write things as 'efficiently' as possible, where the time spent planning a particular section turns immediately into results when writing that section.

It's also something that rarely works the way you'd hope.

There are great benefits to knowing where you're going before you write it. There's the obvious stuff: you can hardly foreshadow a key event if you haven't yet already planned that it should happen. But there's always some difficulty in writing down a section if you don't know where it's going, and there's plenty of danger that you'll write yourself into a dead end. And even with the question of the plot changing, it's very reasonable that understanding how the plot needs to change is easier when you know how the plot is supposed to fit together beforehand. (I've spent half a year on my project going nowhere because I actually needed to write another event first to make everything work: better planning could have saved me from that.)

As for the reasoning behind your Creative Writing course setting this... for a course of study like this they are going to want to train everyone to give you an entire toolkit as a writer. I would hardly be surprised if they have exercises where they just give you a prompt and expect an instantly written short story (where you and your fellow pantsers would have an easier time and the planners among your group would be asking stackexchange questions). Your situation is just the flipside of this: your writing course setting the most extreme possible planning task. That way, everyone gets gets the entire panster-planner range of tools and therefore the most broad-ranging possible ways to write. When you become a professional writer, you'll still be a natural at going with the flow but you'll be better at digging yourself out of plotholes than you are now thanks to these exercises.

Original score: 13