I noticed this when I was TA'ing for a Prolog course at a London university. I was marking papers and it was obvious that a respectable chunk of the students on

I noticed this when I was TA'ing for a Prolog course at a London university. I was marking papers and it was obvious that a respectable chunk of the students on the course had simply copied from each other. I did not say anything to the course tutor, partly because I had no idea who was copying from whom, they all had the same code with the same mistakes and idiosyncracies in their papers. The year after that I TA'd again and I found the same code copied in the new year's students' papers. I looked online but I couldn't find the original source. This was before ChatGPT so an LLM wasn't the source. The worst thing about it was that I could tell which students were really trying to do the job on their own. Most of the time their code bore all the hallmarks of a novice Prolog programmer, i.e. it was a convoluted mess that betrayed complete confusion about the language. For Prolog, this is normal and it does not indicate a student who is lazy or sloppy, only the difficult of the language. My first efforts in Prolog weren't any better. But now, the students that obviously copied from each other had papers that looked like they deserved a better mark than the ones who had obviously done the right thing and tried. To be honest, I couldn't find it in me to give a bad mark to anyone (except for a couple of cases where the papers were basically blank where my hand was forced). I gave lots of feedback, trying to help anyone who wanted to learn, to learn, and gave them all a mark near the top 10-20%. I think the course was an elective anyway. My dad used to teach an elective course at a university and he was incredibly harsh about it, and I guess that left a sort of aversion.