Whether it is a Master's thesis in electrical engineering, a weekend paper in Economics, or a take-home project in basketweaving, at some point every night we all need to stop punting and get to work. Caffeine is our friend as we struggle long nights trying to figure out exactly what that upside-down triangle is doing to the magnetic field equation anyway.
At Random, tooling is often a group activity. Many times I will go into one of the many kitchens to find a dozen people all camped out working on their own problem sets. Often, people taking the same class will work together. This isn't cheating but actually collaboration. Rather than just copy someone else's answer, people will draw equations and vector fields and turtles and lots of other things on blackboards and have heated arguments that will often draw in people who've been working on similar problems for years. The most interesting time is when two frosh begin with an argument about how to solve an introductory mechanics problem and two grad students start arguing about who is right.
While MIT's workload can be a real pain sometimes, there are always people around who are taking the same class, who have taken that class before or who just think they can figure it out and who are willing to take the time to talk to you about it. It is a really nice environment. Rather than cite statistics about Random's average GPA and how many class bibles we have in our library to cheat out of, it is important to understand that people at Random really do learn collaboratively.
On the other hand, people will often find the kitchens distracting. The truth is, it's a heck of a lot of fun to be tooling in a kitchen with a dozen of your friends and often more fun to just sit around talking to them whilst pretending to tool. That is when Random Hall's dual nature is really nice. On the one hand, Random's family atmosphere makes it really easy to work alongside people. On the other, people will respect your privacy so that if you need to retreat into your room and just sit down and get cracking, people will give you the space you need. Random is a really cool place that way.