When I was doing my CS Degree The university's policy for cheating was Zero Tolerance, it was generally a zero in the particular assignment, failing grade in the course, or expulsion, depending on how grievous the offence.
The CS department did it a little differently. It is fairly easy to tell if you copy a programming assignment(loop structure is identical, code is identical, variable names, etc.), so what they would do is divide the total grade of the assignment and split it between all the people who copied, so if 4 people copied, there was no way to determine who copied who, so the maximum mark you could get was 25%.
This happens once and no one wants to cheat simply because by letting someone else copy of you, you are taking a chance at screwing yourself.
Collaboration was still encouraged, but wholesale copying obviously punished.
This is a terrible policy which rather encourages cheating.
Let's say that two students need help from one another on parts of an assignment. If they cheat their chance of getting caught is 50%. If they don't get caught their grade is (it doesn't matter for purposes of discussion) a 100 each. If they don't cheat they get a 0 each because they just can't complete the assignment.
So the expected payoff from NOT cheating is 0.
And the expected payoff from cheating is 0.5 * 100 + 0.5 * (100 / 2) = 75.
Who wouldn't cheat? Even if the probability of getting caught was 100%, you'd expect to get a 50. Holy cow! What university IS THIS?
The only way to discourage cheating is to make the net utility of cheating negative, and so negative that every student realizes it.
Besides the fact that the expected value for not completing the assignment isn't 0. You would get partial marks for completing what you could,assuming what you complete is correct, the outcome isn't binary.
If you would get partial marks for completing what you can, where is the upside in cheating in this scenario where the maximum you get is 50%, which you may get from your partially completed assignment.
Cheating is always taken on a case by case basis. There is always a chance that if you get caught doing this(or doing this more then once), you could easily get a zero in the course, expelled or one of the other university's regulations.
I think the entire point for this initial leniency I think is that on an assignment where you are encouraged to collaborate, some students can cross the line from collaboration to copying.
> If you would get partial marks for completing what you can, where is the upside in cheating in this scenario where the maximum you get is 50%, which you may get from your partially completed assignment.
There are two factors to utility: probability of getting caught, and the outcome of getting caught.
The problem is that the probability of getting caught, while substantial, is actually much lower than 50% in my experience. As a result the payoff differential has to be that much worse.
Let's revisit my example. In order for cheating not to be the smart thing to do, the expected grade for not cheating would have to be over 75!
And that's with a ridiculous 50% chance of being caught. Now if we lowered the probability of being caught to, say, 25%, the expected grade for not cheating would have to exceed 0.75 * 100 + 0.25 * (100/2) = 87.5.
The CS department did it a little differently. It is fairly easy to tell if you copy a programming assignment(loop structure is identical, code is identical, variable names, etc.), so what they would do is divide the total grade of the assignment and split it between all the people who copied, so if 4 people copied, there was no way to determine who copied who, so the maximum mark you could get was 25%. This happens once and no one wants to cheat simply because by letting someone else copy of you, you are taking a chance at screwing yourself.
Collaboration was still encouraged, but wholesale copying obviously punished.