Hi Michael. That change was made two years ago. Oddly, no-one has commented until two days ago!
For an explanation of the rationale and various workarounds, see the discussion in this very recent thread in the Question author's forum. I like Paul's suggestion of using the ScratchpadUI. It's specifically designed to allow students to experiment with code, whereas the Check button is intended for grading code. You don't want to grade code that the student hasn't touched, do you? However, do note that the ScratchpadUI doesn't allow the code to access support files.