Truants come to me when they’re about to be expelled and ask:
“Vladimir Igorevich, what do we need to do to pass your course?”
“Make up and defend all the lab assignments.”
“Can we do them at home and bring you the reports?”
“Yes, of course you can.”
The students turn around and leave happy. They know they’ll ask their groupmates to give them the reports, change the last name there, and the next day come to me to defend them, and who knows, maybe manage to answer enough for a C.
But the truants don’t know one thing: there are no reports for my labs. In class, I specifically tell students not to waste paper and not to make reports. It’s enough for me to see a working program, the source code right from the computer, and I mark it made up. The job is done — the make-up is recorded.
I’ve been doing this since 2007. Interestingly, the students who promised to show up with reports would leave, and I never saw them again. Apparently, they’re still looking for the reports.
What I require from students who do lab assignments on their own is to prove that they did them on their own. And that’s very easy to check in one minute of simple dialogue. A person who did the lab themselves answers briskly. The one who copied it hums and mumbles.