[ekidd]

> Maybe I'm very cynical, but I think almost anybody would cheat if it was made easy enough and they were given the chance.

This attitude is so strange to me. I would assume that cheaters are a minority of students. (Perhaps a large minority, sadly. I've heard some third-hand stories.)

My school had a policy of an automatic 9 month suspension for a first offense. Professors were officially discouraged from exercising any discretion, and they were supposed to report all incidents to the disciplinary committee. For a second offense, the penalty was a permanent expulsion. I did see the system fail a few times when I was there, but it worked a lot of the time.

[leetcrew]

having such a severe penalty for the first offense probably causes professors to look the other way if they don't agree that it's reasonable. imo, the severity of the offense can vary a lot. cheating on a homework might not be as bad as cheating on an exam (worth a lot more points), wholesale copying of answers is much worse than getting a little too much help from your study group.

as far as how widespread cheating is, that probably depends on the culture at your particular institution. my school had a very strict policy for programming assignments: you were only allowed to discuss them with the instructor, a TA, or in public on piazza. and yet, every time I went into the cs lab, I would see everyone huddled around each other laptops debugging code for the latest assignment. I'm not sure whether they simply didn't understand the rule or didn't realize how obvious it was what they were doing, but essentially everyone in that room was bending the rules a little.