[hn_asker]

This heavily biases in favor of lone wolves in college. I was one myself. I'd say we are rare. Most people are social and learn by collaborating with others. It's the more natural approach. Evolution has groomed us to be social after all.

[CobrastanJorji]

Maybe 15 years ago, Georgia Tech rolled out a pretty great homework copy detector for the Java kids. The guy who wrote it was well aware that students knew to change variable names and such, so he just had it compare generated byte code instead. It caught something like 200 cheaters. It was a huge problem because Tech really, really didn't want to just expel or fail everyone like the academic rules required, so they created a sort of case-by-case comparison and punished students to various lesser degrees based on some rubric or other.

Anyway, the next year they adjusted by saying "it's absolutely fine to collaborate on homework and projects. Go nuts. Copy off each other all you want. Also, homework is just 25% of your grade now, quizzes and exams are everything." This made for pretty terrifying quizzes, but things worked out for everybody (except folks with a lot of test anxiety) because folks who actually did the homework tended to be the ones that did well on exams anyway.

[warlog]

Collaboration to learn isn't penalized. Just the collab to cheat part.

[TeMPOraL]

Depends on the incentive schemes too.

Back when I was an undergrad studying Applied CS, we[0] had a really friendly, cooperative attitude - we would help each other learn, do homework together; people who turned out to be good at a particular topic would often compile guides and learning material and FAQs for everyone else. Late in my studies I discovered this was seen as a highly unusual thing about our sub-faculty[1]. Other faculties had much more competitive, every person for themselves attitude.

It turns out, the driving factor was that our sub-faculty had different rules about scolarships: you had to cross a threshold of high grades on a given year to be eligible for one, and the amount of money you got was purely determined by your grade average. Everywhere else, scolarships were limited to top % best students. Where everyone else competed and kept their hard-won knowledge to themselves, we'd routinely assist each other, so that everyone could get a shot at getting the scolarship.

I hear that after I graduated, they normalized the incentive scheme to % top students everywhere, and that new Applied CS groups got as unfriendly as everyone else was.

--

[0] - All years studying Applied CS in our sub-faculty[1], not just my year. Don't know what the proper English term for it is, in Poland we call it "kierunek" (literally: direction), vs. "rocznik" meaning a class of a particular year studying on a "kierunek".

[1] - Not sure what's the right term for this either. Our faculty had essentially two branches that dealt with overlapping fields of study; as I was graduating, they ended up splitting into two separate faculties.

[Robotbeat]

Huh. Your comment makes me think. I wonder if some of the push-back on standardized testing is partly because students cannot chea— I mean rely on “social collaboration”? (Not ALL of the pushback, of course. But part of it..)