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I have pretty mixed feelings about this new section also. When I was dawdling in community college, I barely passed the essay part of some standardized test even though I had rather high SAT Verbals and was getting top grades on all my writing for classes. But pedagogically speaking, I have to stand up for the boring old intro-support-support-support-conclusion format. Until that format is both boring and easy for a student, it should be beaten into them with sticks. Like Picasso said about painting--you gotta learn the rules so you can break them well.
That 5-paragraph stuff is even more boring to grade than it is to write, but it is quick and painless grading compared to reading the work of students who really don't understand paragraph structure, much less a standard essay. I hope your college writing proessor distinguished between students like you and folks who'd escaped high school without much idea of the difference between commas and periods.
Then again, literacy is really going out of fashion, so maybe never mind...
I hear you, and I can assure you my professor knows what he is talking about. I am perfectly capable of following the aforementioned system if I so choose, and I never said that students shouldn't be taught to follow it. I just don't think I should be penalized if I am capable of writing a cohesive paragraph without it.
The format is a starting point, not something you should absolutely have to follow, just like the rule against starting a sentence with 'and' or 'but'. In case you didn't know, there is nothing grammatically incorrect with starting a sentence that way. Students are discouraged from doing so because it tends to encourage the formation of fragments over sentences.
Anyway, I guess that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Ah, well. 
