[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.