The course Programming in C, and other courses like Compilers, have this policy across many CS universities for many years now. It s a strict policy but it has its reasons. Assignments on early semesters are simple and short, and if students cooperate on the implementation, the result would be almost identical for everyone, while very few would have truly thought it out by themselves. Most students would not go easily through the process to struggle in order to think about the solution, if they could just copy the answer from someone else.