Thread:BunsenH/@comment-37867815-20191117164709/@comment-24577221-20191117211943

One of the best things about this wiki is that people cooperate to figure things out, and share the information.

Schools and universities have very strict rules against students copying their work, either from each other or from the work of previous students. (And since I worked as a lab teacher, I have lots of stories about people who broke those rules, in extremely obvious ways.)  But for some of my university courses, I cooperated with a friend of mine. We would both work through the problem sets, and then we compared our answers. If we came up with different answers, we went through things step by step until we found out where one of us had made a mistake. That person then worked through that problem to the end by him/herself. If we still didn't match, we did it again. There were a couple of times when we both got it wrong. I was a bit better than she was about figuring out how to solve the problem, but I made a lot more mistakes than she did when it came to doing the work, step by step.

Our skills complemented each other well, and the result was that we both got good marks and learned the work really well... which was the whole point of doing it, after all. I don't see anything wrong with that kind of cooperation, and I've never objected to my students doing it. (Which would, after all, be very hypocritical!)  The problem comes when someone doesn't understand the solution, but copies someone else's work blindly and hands it in as their own.