I was a TA at your school (Stanford). I like that policy, but I also witnessed cheating firsthand. Specifically, I graded a take-home midterm exam where 3 students handed in the same bizarrely wrong answer. The students received penalties on that test, but no other disciplinary action was taken. This was in the mechanical engineering department in a graduate level mechatronics course (that I suspect you've taken).
If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is so disgracefully lax.
In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the wall.
In my experience (another school, another country), it was usually allowed to take a take-home exam together with others. The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload and that working together with other smart students teaches important skills in addition to a better understanding of the subject.
The same goes for homework problem sets: me and two others would usually first solve them ourselves to the best of our ability and then compare answers, which was always an educational experience; the more so when no one had successfully solved the problem on their own or when it took someone a while to convince the other two their (identical) solutions were wrong.
> The understanding was that the exams are sufficiently hard, that students smart enough to pass do not allow others to freeload...
That sounds like a flawed assumption to me. There are lots of social and economic incentives that might lead someone smart to do others' work.
I tend to agree that working with others on problem sets can be quite beneficial. Many classes I took had the same policy on those. But at some point you have to prove you can do it yourself.
It would be interesting to have a web application that both people submitted the answers to and it came back with just "same" or "different". Might be one was to genuinely compare quickly. Then based on the number of sames you could discuss the differents (or decline to).
I find that comparing answers make a lot of sense when you all know each other and your level of skill. I often check answers with my roommate on math problem sets, and I know we're about at the same level, so neither of us freeloads.
If I were making the rules, those students would be out of the university the same day. There is no shortage of smart people who would love to attend Stanford, especially the engineering school. I have no idea why enforcement is so disgracefully lax.
In the electrical engineering department, I regularly had classmates ask me if we could "compare answers" on homework problem sets. Sometimes (rarely), this was for a genuine goal of education-- if your answer is wrong, you want to know that so you can figure out the right answer. More often, it was clueless people trying to collect answers from multiple other people. Drove me up the wall.