What this is is an instance of an institution that doesn't want to create a new syllabus every year. Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for a modern education but the instructors simply rely on years old assignments year after year. And somehow this are worried about ethics?
Is it really that hard or asking too much for this lazy department to tweak the code so that it's different from prior years?
Maybe. Point is, people posted their homework online, allowing others - also during the same year - to just copy the work. They could do that offline too, but either way it's just not cool. The students in question should probably be reprimanded as well if they were told it wasn't permitted to post the solutions online. We have an assessment as part of our hiring process, there too it's not permitted by applicants to make their solutions public - and making a new assignment would cost us a lot of money in terms of lost billable hours, especially if it would have to be done for every applicant.
Tweaking your assignments but keeping the main thrust is more efficient and probably provides better experiences. The bugs get worked out, the professors and instructors have worked through it.
The real issue is that students keep this stuff and pass it down year to year.
I remember taking ECE 451 at Illinois and someone had taken photographs of the solutions that were posted on the wall for students to look it.
There are way to identify weak students even when they google all the answers. Base your grades on assignments, tests, projects, presentations, pop quiz, etc.. you will see the pattern.
I agree completely. I didn't go to school for computer science or anything fancy like that. I studied Music Theory. Frankly, I think those luddites in the music building have done a pretty good job of tackling the plagiarism problem, and it's something that can be learned from by others.
At the beginning stages of a music theory course, you are learning the very basic rules. How did Bach's music work? That's where pretty much everyone starts. And you learn how his music worked by finishing his stuff. The early exercises (which I think are analogous here to having some code or library provided) are basically, "Here's the first part of a piece of music by Bach. Finish it in the style of Bach."
Then you go from there, gradually, with less and less hand-holding.
Is it possible to plagiarize these things? Of course! You can just look up the piece and finish it the way that Bach did.
There are some students who did things like that. The professors never bothered to say anything. They didn't have to. Because by the end of the class, you are all on your own. "Write a short piece of music in the style of Bach with the following features: . . . ."
Is it really that hard or asking too much for this lazy department to tweak the code so that it's different from prior years?