From the article:

Complicating matters is the collaborative ethos among programmers, which encourages code-sharing in ways that might not be acceptable in a class. Professors also frequently allow students to discuss problems among themselves, but not to share actual code, a policy that some students say creates confusion about what constitutes cheating.

Yes, we are all about code reuse, don't reinvent the wheel, 98% of your application is already written and so forth, but there's a difference between citing and plagiarism, the latter being claiming ownership (or concealing someone else's ownership). And there is a blurred line between "doing someone's homework" and "giving private lessons" (or auxiliary classes) to enable proper homework doing.

Writing tests is meant to be done unassisted. How can we tell whether the problems/tasks showing up in SoPW are meant to be solved with or without assistence? Is a complete solution beneficial, at all? The answers must be found again and again for each case, individually, without having a good basis for judgement.

On a broader view, we all seek and find foreign solutions in our daily doing. Strange RADIUS behavior? Kernel Oops? Network problems? Google it! Take and use the work already done by others, if hunting this particular bug is way over your head.

Quick, what is 13 * 16? 0xfe in decimal? Kids use calculators even for one-digit multiplications. We have externalized so many skills into devices and machines, that most people even don't know what skills they could aquire. In a predatory world driven by concurrency the one which most unscrupulously exploits resources wins in the short term. In the long term they remain poor.

The fool makes himself tall to surmount others. The wise makes himself small to surmount himself.

Becoming a fool or a wise person is (also) a personal choice, and there's little or nothing to do about that from the outside.

That article states correctly that "plagiarism" (i.e. not re-inventing the wheel) is a skill to be developed. What it doesn't say is that "plagiarism" should be one in a set of skills that are used to get a task done, all of which are useless or dangerous in the hands of one who has not mastered -- has not bothered to, or tried to, or been required to master -- the fundamental skills of problem solving.

In the situation I was addressing, wherein a student walks in here with an assignment and out of here with a "solution", having gained understanding of neither the question nor the answer, no skill is mastered other than a weaselly way to accelerate the Peter Principle. Therefore, I say again, responsible Monks should not facilitate this type of "plagiarism."



The way forward always starts with a minimal test.