Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department.
For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed).
When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up.
Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.
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Computer Science is sort of odd in that respect, and it does vary from department to department.
For example, my undergrad school was very clear that everyone's home directories were set to being publicly readable, and that it was expected that there would be times that you would want to see someone else's source. This was essentially asynchronous lab work: we could always talk though problems together, but we were never able to cut and paste code (the detection system looked for things like whitespace to detect cut-and-paste vs hand-typed).
When there were two matching submissions, both students would be pulled up and then the administration had to figure out who copied who. What I heard on the grapevine was that usually it was really obvious: students that had been struggling were the ones most likely to cheat, and even when they matched in ability, the guilty party would crack pretty quickly and own up.
Personally, I think there are better ways of doing computer science assignments anyway: I tend to TA classes where students work on self-defined projects rather than doing the same rote exercise, so cut-and-paste is no help anyway.