Yes, but Rails is a known quantity; everyone is aware of what's provided for you in a Rails app and can judge accordingly. It's harder to judge someone's work w

Yes, but Rails is a known quantity; everyone is aware of what's provided for you in a Rails app and can judge accordingly. It's harder to judge someone's work when you know it was written as a school project but you don't know which parts were theirs or how much guidance they were given. As far as the educational values involved, many profs distribute their handouts and assignments relatively freely, e.g. the Berkley Pac-Man projects I linked above, but are wary of having solutions floating around online since that enables cheating. Personally I think this is probably a lost cause, but you can at least understand why they might be resistant to the idea of having students' solutions posted on github (and it's not reasonable to say that teachers should re-develop new projects every year; coming up with good projects is a huge amount of work and it usually makes much more sense to have a single set of course materials that you continue optimizing/refining over time). Of course none of this is meant to apply to open-ended, student-driven class projects, or to work that students do on their own time while being enrolled in a university. I think most people would agree that such work is unambiguously the property of the students that produced it.