Having worked as a TA. These poor people have some pipeline running your code using something like GCC 4.8 or older and changing the pipeline is too much work.
Yeah, you can do many tricks with C++11 (and even more with C++17) and it's nicer to write. But, the algorithms should be the same which is what matters for the course.
Smart pointers is integral to modern C++. You should rarely rely on raw pointers nowadays. They’re just learning outdated practices.
True. Real c++ development should rely on smart pointers as much as possible. Having said that, a student should still learn what a pointer is and how to manually manage it to understand better what the "smart" part of smart pointers does.
From the other post from OP, it doesn't look like this is the purpose of the assignment. So, I think it's more of a case of using old software that cannot handle c++11.