I learned this the hard way. When I was at university I happened to be 'fluent' in 68000 assembly language, so I was able to do that assignment within minutes

I learned this the hard way. When I was at university I happened to be 'fluent' in 68000 assembly language, so I was able to do that assignment within minutes of the task being set, no cheating needed. I actually understood what I was doing and wrote an assignment that was not cribbed from the work of others. I thought this was going to be marked well, passing was expected. However, when the results came out a 'see me' was on the board. The lecturer was angry at me because I wouldn't say who I 'copied my work from'. But then I remembered showing my code to a colleague in the minutes before handing in the assignment. Mine worked perfectly the first time but when I ran it again it failed. I realised I had cleared a 'byte' instead of a 'word' and changed my work accordingly before handing it in. Nobody else had this change, just my work. That one byte of real difference showed I knew 68K assembly when nobody else did. So it turned out that my original 'done in ten minutes' code had been fished out the bin and typed in by someone else, they had then spread this around and everyone on the course except for a few mature students that were out of the loop had copied my stuff. Now this was just one incident, as well as that there were other problems with groupthink which is not the same as cheating. I was behind on one project and submitted a simple diagram. Everyone else submitted reams of stuff, all returned with red pen on most of the pages. My assignment had just the one tick for perfect mark. Had I huddled with my colleagues in depressing group think panic sessions and done my own version of the 70 page assignment they were doing then I would not have got that perfect mark. In my opinion plagiarism is just scraping the surface, beneath that there is a bigger problem of original thought and problem solving. Most people go along with what everyone else is doing.