One of my duties as a teacher at a respected university’s computing department is to assess students’ practical laboratory exercises. One day, a student proudly asked me to mark his work, a short programming exercise involving the development of around ten lines of code. Upon inspecting the code listing, it was very difficult not to notice the considerable preamble which was present at the top of the file. It consisted of a lengthy email header which had originated from a friend of the student and was followed by the line: “Here is the stuff you need to pass the exercise.” He didn’t.
