As a former TA, I can say that finding out if a student completed a project/exercise on its own is _very_ easy. Poking around the code asking questions for arou

As a former TA, I can say that finding out if a student completed a project/exercise on its own is _very_ easy. Poking around the code asking questions for around 2 minutes is largely enough. Instead of DMCA-ting github repos, I find it way more effective to have a five minute talk about what is "cheating" and what is not at the beginning of the semester. Collaborative brainstorming is encouraged, helping struggling others is fine, giving them solutions is not (because you're just stealing their reward). After a while they would eventually stop looking up solutions and just ask their peers for some advice/code review. My job became surprisingly easy when I started treating students like adults.