There was a lot of "cheating" going on in my program when I was in university. The nature of the program (computer science) meant that a lot of the exercises have previously been done before by other people so all you had to do was google to find your answer. But of course of you copied a solution directly, it would be obvious especially since there was a system (which dug into the heart and core of your program logic) my school used to check for plagiarism although it wasnt fool proof.
A lot of the times, googling the solution, understanding the solution, and re-writing the solution would help you understand the concepts but that only applied if you were willing to sit down and try to understand it as opposed to re-writing it to fool the plagarism system. Its probably not what the instructor wanted you to do but if the instructor's intent is to learn something, then this accomplished it. If the instructors goal was to see if you could figure it out yourself, then this method did not accomplish it.