As it turns out, a lot of student code can look this way anyway. Something crazy like 70% of authentic student code can have dead code in assignment submissions.
Having assessed student code this does not surprise me. Source code control late at night for students, especially non-CS majors, tends to be variations of "append a number to the end of the function name" eg. sum1(x, y) sum2(x, y) ... sumTHISREALLYWORKS(x, y).
That said, if dead code was being used to hide plagiarism, which is something I had not considered before, then telling students they would be marked down for dead code would probably be enough to stop it.
Harsh! I like to think I am good lecturer.
Depends on the specification of the assignment. In my case I teach data science not software development so the specification is not "bullet proof code that won't break when pytorch releases a new version tomorrow" but rather statistical and data rigour. This is where spent my time when marking, not how maintainable the code is.
CS students turn in MUCH better code, but frequently data is leaking into tests or validation sets etc. making the results either meaningless or compromised.
At the end of the day code quality is strongly correlated to grades.
I didn't study anything related to computers/software/programming in school, so I don't know what level is expected. But if I was tutoring someone and they handed me something with dead code in random locations in it, it would certainly catch my attention.
1. Students will frequently just try things until it works, move code around, etc., leading to very messy code. 2. Graders often do not look at individual assignments unless there is a reason to do so, often relying on automated test suites. And when they do look, I'd bet their first reaction is something like "I don't know why they're repeating themselves like this, but my rubric only penalizes them for 5 points here..."