> Some even ask if they can take the "assignment" home and get back to me.
The amount of cut-and-paste I've seen on "take home" assignments is just staggering.
I've only ever used it for pre-screening before scheduling phone interviews, and so only a handful of very simple questions as I'd have considered it unfair to ask anyone to put much effort in that early in the process. I always cut and paste a few sentences into Google. One hiring round in particular stands out to me, as a substantial majority of candidates had cut and pasted answers. There were always some, but that was extreme.
The worst thing was that many of them got the answers wrong. I'd have been open to considering them if someone honestly told me they didn't know the answer but was able to find an answer on Google, and showed me they'd been able to look up the correct answer.
But we got things like someone trying to pass of a one page cut and paste from an Oracle manual to a question about MySQL that required a one sentence answer as their own. And someone who cut and pasted a reply to the same question from a forum post, but who failed to read on to where other commenters had explained at length why the answer they'd cut and pasted was wrong.
I mean, I often search for solutions to things I don't know by heart. Knowing how to find the right solution by search is a skill itself and a developer that knows how to learn can be valuable, but the combination of dishonesty and apparent failure to be able to ascertain the quality of the responses they found was terrifying given that many of these applicants had believable CVs that included years of working as developers elsewhere. (Of course given their willingness to lie about their answers, I can't really trust CV's either given we never got far enough in the process to request references; I'd like to think their CVs were fake too, because the alternative is worse)