I think of helping each other as part of the reason we put students in the same room to begin with. So when a student asks another for help with understanding a concept and the other refuses that request, that's working against the purposes of group education, i.e. sabotage.
But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)
I agree with you, but also most of the time when people ask each other for help it isn't to help understand a concept. It's usually for source code.
In the class I mentioned above, the prof and TAs weren't pissed off about people using each other to understand concepts or even high level design. They were pissed because people were copying source code verbatim, comments and custom debug messages and all
On a related note, if someone ever asked me for help with a concept or high level design I would be more than happy to oblige. But (most of the time) people aren't asking for that, they want source code that they didn't contribute to
this could be fixed by making assignments collaborative, but then the professor has no means of verifying where everyone is in terms of understanding
But I admit I might be a bit radical here compared to most people. (Who I am sure will argue that utilising teacher time to the maximum is the only reason to gather students in one room.)