[kurtisc]

Is it cheating for a professional software developer to use Stack Overflow? If they copy and paste, perhaps, but not if they use it to get a better understanding of something. It's very difficult to grade understanding.

Doctors go through a lot to graduate. Universities are welcome to put all students through the same level of scrutiny, working closely with a professional who can decide if they are unfit for the course.

Aside from thesis defences, they usually choose not to, because contact hours are prohibitively more expensive than a room full of exams and a few TAs.

[Houshalter]

It's not any more cheating to look at stack overflow, then it is for a doctor to look up more information in a medical reference book. But neither should rely on those resources to do their job for them, with no understanding of the underlying domain. A developer should easily be able to write FizzBuzz without using Stack Overflow.