[ktsmith]

I would guess that this is handled differently between universities and even between departments at the same university. My math and science profs went out of their way to encourage collaboration. The courses were typically weighted so that test results were the majority of your grade. If you were cheating on the homework by copying everything from your study group you'd be found out on the test. The CS department was a mixed bag. Lots of group projects, lots of collaboration encouragement, but some of the intro courses like algorithms took the collaborating is cheating approach.

Where I encountered the most resistance to collaboration was in the humanities. Any course that had lots of writing or research pretty much had a work by yourself mandate. I blew through those courses without much effort and wouldn't have worked in groups anyway, but I always found it odd how often plagiarism was brought up and threats about academic suspension were made.