[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.