I originally posted this to QAForums.com in April 2002, but I don't want to lose it, so I am blogging it. Some students were "cheating" in a CS program at Georgia Tech.

"Many of the cases appear to be just ... similarities in a few lines of computer code on a very complicated assignment...

A brand-new rule says a computer science student is wrong to try to seek answers to questions ANYWHERE other than from course materials or Georgia Tech staff. Rooting around in old books in the library, checking the Internet, calling your cousin at Caltech--all are forbidden."

- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58274-2002Apr16.html

 

"Through the university level, assignements are designed to produce grades for individual work, not for teamwork. This reaches a culmination in the Ph.D. dissertation, where originality is a core requirement.   ...

Upon showing up at work, though, the same people are told by the business owners that they should not write new programs but should scavenge solutions created throughout the industry over the history of the field. They should use as many existing solutions as possible, without violating intellectual property rights.

The rewards offered for this behavior are meager. People continue to receive low evaluations for reusing code instead of writing new code. Promotions come to those who do the most and the best programming, not those who successfully hook together existing components."

- "Agile Software Development", by Alistair Cockburn, page 51.