[cat-dev-null]

This is one of the big things that was taught at UC Davis undergrad program, at least in the past. In order to assure portability, students have access to many nix platforms (SGI, Arch Linux, Solaris, etc.) and their homedirs mount as you'd expected at login to any of the boxes in the pool. I think they have FreeBSD boxes now, but I could be wrong. (EDIT: nope, what a shame. The trio of BSDs.)

PS: I nearly got thrown out for running John The Ripper on everyone's password hashes, which were conveniently served up over NIS. I did inform a prof that his password was super, super insecure because I mailed it to him. :)) Then, I nearly got thrown out again for mirroring some Oracle DBMS docs because they were stupidly IP restricted, and I didn't want physically go to CSIF cluster. Finally graduated though, I think they were just glad to get rid of yours truly. :)

[cperciva]

I've heard stories about a professor who wanted to teach his students to write portable code and announced that he would test their programs on one of <insert long list of UNIX systems> but he wasn't going to tell them which.

Does that sound familiar? It might be pure apocrypha.

[cat-dev-null]

Yup. In undergrad lower-division courses, we were explicitly informed of this and tradeoffs of proprietary toolchain features. And, most lectures / graders / readers followed through. They had a custom hand-in system on the student-side and then their own scripts to run batches of student builds wherever they chose. Some courses wanted Makefiles, others wanted things like "build.sh" and "run.sh".

BTW: The uni also claimed (unverified, could be an empty threat) a multi-institution (Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, etc.), code plagiarism detection system covering two decades of coursework. (Maybe MOSS.)