Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's software to detect copy-pasted code or plagiarized (it analyses the syntax tree so renaming the variables and changing indentation won't fool it!). The best however, is a 1:1 code review with a TA or Prof. Randomly jumping to files, reading the code and asking questions about it. Extremely hard to copy a codebase and learn it well enough you can explain it but really easy to do if you wrote it yourself.
I have to wonder how well that analysis code works in practice. for a lot of intro-level (and some mid-level) course assignments, there's only one or two straightforward ways to write the code. sometimes these assignments are just pasting together sample code from the powerpoint with a couple tweaks. I was a TA for a few of these courses, and the correct solutions tended to be very similar. I was only sure students w…
Sure the later can copy their assignments. But once they'll hit a non-trivial assignment or a code review in a more advance class they won't be able to fake it anymore. You are just delaying their transfer to another major. And that gives the CS department one extra course they can collect tuition from and justify hiring TAs for...