[omoikane]

The usual defense against these is to ask students to explain their submitted work. Randomly generated dead code would likely be even more difficult for the students to explain.

Though a counterargument to this would be that teachers don't have time to interview every student. If Mossad is so good that teachers can't pick out the objectively suspicious subset, they might need to subjectively pick a random sample with varying amount of personal bias involved.

[jrm4]

Yup. I sort of independently discovered this mechanism, and not just for "cheating," but for group work. Didn't even have to go individual interviews.

It was simple, I let students work in groups to do coding stuff (it's an intro type of class with students of varying skill levels). I had them work on a project together all they wanted, letting them know that it would be turned in about a month or so before the end of the semester. I would review them and then, in class, they would INDIVIDUALLY be quizzed on their own teams project; down to e.g.

"You have a function blahblah, explain what it does. What would happen if I passed it X?"

Forces them to work together and sort of study together. Kind of puts a bit more pressure on the less knowledgable, but probably worth it.