I understand that it's plagiarism when you're supposed to be learning and writing your own code, but perhaps this is the wrong way to teach programming. It sho

I understand that it's plagiarism when you're supposed to be learning and writing your own code, but perhaps this is the wrong way to teach programming. It shouldn't be such a big deal if you find an open source library or code snippet on StackOverflow that solves your homework assignment. Maybe the problem lies with the assignments. They could be rotated, rewritten each year, or even randomized for every student, so that you really have to understand the code you're writing (or copying). If you find some code that solves 90% of your problem, and you know how to tweak it to solve the remaining 10%, then that's a far more valuable and practical skill than writing everything from scratch. It's also a great way to learn from other programmers and see what they are doing. I'm probably completely off-base, since I'm a self-taught developer, so my learning style is very different. But I spend the vast majority of my time reading other people's code, studying documentation, and using open source libraries. "Plagiarism" is a very, very important part of this industry. It would be interesting to work on randomized coding assignment generators. I've worked on similar things in the past, where my company used it as a filter for software engineering applications. I wonder if any universities would be interested in that. It would completely solve the plagiarism problem, because every student would have to write unique code to solve the problem they were given.