What version-control system is most trivial to set up and use for toy projects?

Question

I teach the third required intro course in a CS department. One of my homework assignments asks students to speed up code they have written for a previous assignment. Fact

Answer 1

I would say your best bet will be to try to work with your IT department to set up a system/method for your students to easily create new SVN/CVS repositories.

Probably you could get the IT department to give you the privileges necessary to create repositories for your students even if they won't give the priveleges to the students themselves. You could probably pretty easily write a few scripts to mass-create repositories from lists of students at the beginning of the semester.