What's more valuable independant thinking or relying on others?

The problem is that I enrolled in school to learn how to become a better person in terms of thinking and attitude towards life and school expects us to do our own work. So when we do our "own" work reading from text book and online, seems ot be the way to go as long as we reference or use academic material. How about asking your TA and Prof? Sure, if you get stuck...but when there is not time to meet deadlines we see all sorta things going on....most people get to gether to survive, copy ideas of another, usually from a few expert pupils in that area...so officially we violate school policy of pladgirism, more importantly we rely on each other to solve rather on our own intelligence or even worse forge answers...consequently we won't develop the right thinking habit which we might want to value more for future callanges outside school. But then again if people can do the same in their work like ask each other, and take credit for sth not their own work, then what is the diffrence?