Comment by Asooka
7 years ago
For a lot of those courses there's pretty much one way to solve the coursework, so all solutions are pretty similar. It's practically impossible to tell the difference between an original solution and a copied solution with the variables renamed and some code moved around. Or the student can look at the solution and reimplement it themselves, without solving it on their own. Sharing solutions can even get you expelled in many unis.
I'm going to suggest that it's on the universities to find a way around that problem. It's a real problem, but everything being publicly available online is how the world is now. Just varying assignments every year should be enough. If reasonable variations don't make the assignments challenging enough? Well the students are always going to be able to find some reasonable variation online. Starting from absolute scratch is just not a thing anymore in most fields.
It should be on a student to choose whether or not do they want a challenge, what particular aspect and what degree they'd like to be challenged in. The job of an educational institution is to educate, whoever interested can easily invent a challenge for themselves or use an old challenge without looking at ready solutions if they so desire. Forced artificial challenge policy is questionable.
They have found a way around that problem...they expel students who share solutions.