Cheating on programming assignments has been rampant forever at every undergrad institution I have experience with and somewhat present among graduate students. My experience spans about 25 years in that space now.
When I taught an introductory class, I gave open-book exams with no laptops or phones allowed. About 1/3 of the class was unable to write a syntactically correct for loop in Python despite our textbook being an introductory Python-based book chock full of examples. It was pretty clear that a subset of students were either working together on project assignments or out-and-out having someone else do the assignments for them. I mainly compensated for this by having a large part of the grade being a 1-1 meeting with me to talk me through the code. That and the exam had the effect of actually making cheating somewhat less worthwhile. But this approach simply doesn't scale these days - my max class was around 32-33 students and the time I spent meeting with students was insane. I haven't taught in a few years and understand that class sizes of 150+ are not uncommon. I could have never used the same approach with that many students. I probably would have doubled-down on exams and made exam length darn near impossible to finish without actually knowing the material well enough to do without referring to the textbook.
I was teaching more from a practice-based viewpoint so mostly I came up with "weird" projects that mirrored problems I spend time on (data cleaning, using existing libraries to do neat little things, and also having students pick a personal project to implement that I helped them scope appropriately).
We bitch and moan about interview whiteboarding but given grade inflation its kind of hard to trust university credentials. Grade inflation was kind of disheartening in that the worst students didn't really get a poor grade. But I also didn't have any problems with the top 1/3 of the class getting a very high grade - these students were motivated, understood the material, and often impressed me with where they got in a single semester.
I recently worked at a large state university. I remember a conversation with an instructor in a master-level operating systems course. One of the assignments was to implement a simple filesystem. The amount of cheating was insane. He started academic dishonesty proceedings against many of the students but the department pressured him to "work it out."
He had to basically interview each student individually and ask for an explanation of the code. Most could not explain what their code was doing (because they didn't write it).
They were all given an opportunity to resubmit original work. Many could not do it, because they simply didn't understand the basics of programming, or the language they were using, or how computers even worked.
That is just awful - I have similar stories. To me, it seems so unfortunate that students are just in this desperate grind to get all A's.
But I'm on the other side and don't have the stress of "my whole life depends on looking like an all-star" at university. Like, what do you do if you leave school with such a severe lack of actual skill?
OTOH, the last year I taught, every student in the program I was an adjunct for graduated with a job offer in hand. Maybe it all works out fine.
The majority of CS Masters students in the US don't have a BS in CS, or have one from a non top tier overseas university. Even more so than undergrad, Masters students in CS are there for the credentials, so I would expect cheating to be worse.
In reality there's only a small percentage who are genuine creators. The rest are copycats also because the opportunity to copy exists.
The other side is real world pressure for good grades and when you're young you want to party and experience life. You finished that assignment by copy pasting it. It's better than not finishing it.
However you get that anywhere in life. Why is, sorry, was Stackoverflow so popular?
Why is religion still a thing?
People want easy answers to hard questions.
Cheating on programming assignments has been rampant forever at every undergrad institution I have experience with and somewhat present among graduate students. My experience spans about 25 years in that space now.
When I taught an introductory class, I gave open-book exams with no laptops or phones allowed. About 1/3 of the class was unable to write a syntactically correct for loop in Python despite our textbook being an introductory Python-based book chock full of examples. It was pretty clear that a subset of students were either working together on project assignments or out-and-out having someone else do the assignments for them. I mainly compensated for this by having a large part of the grade being a 1-1 meeting with me to talk me through the code. That and the exam had the effect of actually making cheating somewhat less worthwhile. But this approach simply doesn't scale these days - my max class was around 32-33 students and the time I spent meeting with students was insane. I haven't taught in a few years and understand that class sizes of 150+ are not uncommon. I could have never used the same approach with that many students. I probably would have doubled-down on exams and made exam length darn near impossible to finish without actually knowing the material well enough to do without referring to the textbook.
I was teaching more from a practice-based viewpoint so mostly I came up with "weird" projects that mirrored problems I spend time on (data cleaning, using existing libraries to do neat little things, and also having students pick a personal project to implement that I helped them scope appropriately).
We bitch and moan about interview whiteboarding but given grade inflation its kind of hard to trust university credentials. Grade inflation was kind of disheartening in that the worst students didn't really get a poor grade. But I also didn't have any problems with the top 1/3 of the class getting a very high grade - these students were motivated, understood the material, and often impressed me with where they got in a single semester.