I was a teaching assistant for multiple courses at a UK university. There was an introductory functional programming course, and two other functional programmin

I was a teaching assistant for multiple courses at a UK university. There was an introductory functional programming course, and two other functional programming based courses that followed up from that. The courses all had large practical programming exercises, and exams at the end. However, every year there would be a good amount of students that did the follow up courses, that would not even know how to define the simplest function, use/define a list, etc, when I was trying to help them work on the practical exercises. These were weekly voluntary 4 hour labs in which we were available to help them and there was no performance pressure. Somehow they always had a solution by the end of the deadline despite getting stuck during the labs. Of course this was often clearly copied. However, I was strongly discouraged by the lecturer to ever make an issue out of this, even when at one point a student handed in a copy with someone else's name on it. Basically the university barely dared to formally accuse students, and the lecturers also didn't want to deal with the hassle. Most of these students ended up passing the module, and later on the whole course. It made me really sad/frustrated. It did help setting expectations when performing interviews for software engineers at certain companies I worked in the past. I would ask a candidate to use their most comfortable programming language and would start with a simple version of a problem to get them in their comfort zone. Sadly, I would often have to simplify that multiple times, and ended up with candidates that could not write a single function, for loop, while loop, interface, class, or any other component of the language they actually wanted to use.