People raise a lot of fuss about plagiarism and cheating, as they should, but I think a lot of the stories on here show that it's not quite as black and white as a lot of authorities would like to pretend. I think it can actually be very slippery where the line lies between "collaborating" or "doing homework together" and "cheating." For example, in morning study hall in high school, I liked to check my math homework answers with another girl in my class who usually got things right. She was concerned that letting me see her homework constituted cheating. Of course it could have, if I were the type of person who would just copy down someone else's answers without thinking about them. But instead, if I found that my answer differed from hers, I would point it out, and we would both go back over our work to see if we'd made an error somewhere. Sometimes neither of us could find an error so we'd just leave our original answers, knowing one of them was wrong but not knowing which one. Plus, it was math, so we had to "show our work" on the page--not that the teacher necessarily studied every student's work for every problem, but the evidence would be right there if we magically leaped to an answer that our work didn't support. If anyone had ever questioned our behavior--which they didn't--I would have said all this, and frankly found it ridiculous if someone in authority told me that was still considered cheating.
On the other hand, I learned early on not to agree to "help" a lot of other students with their homework--say, people who never spoke to me otherwise--because I knew that meant they wanted me to do it for them, or just copy off mine. I don't remember any particular bad experience that led to this knowledge, though.
