Well first of all its very easy to unsmooth a object, you just have to select the object then open the attribute editor(CTR+A) then just find the "polysmooth" or whatever its called and select division level 0, here you can just select a higher level instead of smothing a object several times.

And dont litter your application with things that you think is crap.

And you're lucky that you dont have to send the application at april as we in Sweden have to, you should take this months to try to dig in to those areas for example topology or robot making. You will miss some foundation but hey, you're education is far more important right?

EDIT: You cant open PLE files or export using PLE this is to prevent people from making their files in PLE then borrow a full version for a day to remove the watermark,