I'm a studnet myself. I know that students always try to do some workarond just not to work by themselves.
Anyway plagiarism shoud be punished.
One of my profesors requires that we put suitable credits everywhere, where we cite more than one sentence or something important, even if we rewrite it in our way...
Why? Becouse being a student doesn't mean to discover new energy sources, new stars, bacterias, whatever... Being a student is to learn how to find the right knowledge source, use it (providing suitable credits or disclaimers), and to get to some useful (usually own) conclusions. The same is with profesors :-]
In some disciplines you just can't invent something new just like that (ie. in chemistry), but Perl is not one of those (TIMTOWTDI).

As for me this student has simply copied the code and haven't provided suitable credit - so he should not pass his project. The only good news is, that he was smart enough to know where to search for solution :-]

Greetz, Tom.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.