But often the consequences are rather light. I can't think of anyone facing any serious repercussions -- the worst was failing an assignment.

A long time ago at a university not far away, I and a few classmates all turned in the same report for a group project. The teacher absolutely and rightly thought we were cheating, after which we explained that we interpreted the instructions to mean that a group project would have a group paper. He seemed to accept this and gave us like an extra week to compile our own papers, but he must have smoked an extra bowl that night. I know I would have if I was a professor in that situation!

I've taught university classes, and failed students on the class for cheating. But it's true that I haven't seen anyone kicked out of a program or a university for cheating.

Anecdote: Foreign student where I went to school flat out cheated on the final. When caught, he copped to it. A humanities prof then went to bat for him, saying that it was okay to cheat where he came from. They didn't expel him.

The student may have come from a place where cheating is OK, but he came to a place where it's not OK.

(I don't fault the humanities professor, he may have grown up in a culture where it's acceptable to be full of shit.)

And thank God. As someone who has been unfairly punished for cheating, I appreciate this fact.

This is a general problem with any punitive measure. There will be some false positives (unfair punishments).

I actually do know someone who was not able to get a CS degree because of 'cheating'. His story was that he was working in a group, got verbal clearance from his professor that this kind of collaboration was acceptable, and when that auto-cheating-analysis tool flagged each group members work, the professor claimed not to have said that and was uninterested in fixing the problem.

So, this absolutely does happen. OTOH, I've never personally had any experience with 'borderline' cases. There were enough cut-and-dried cases to keep me busy.

I'm sorry you were unfairly punished.

How should repeated (third or more) plagiarism offenses be addressed if not expulsion?

Anyone else like Bob Dylan... If people cheat, I believe there is a slow train comming.

Example: I had a friend who had an interview for company XYZ, "Write a program that clicks the first link in a wikipedia entry and exits when you reach the philosophy page (implement in the language of your choice). You have 15 mins"...

My friend was a really hard working, intelligent, and honest guy and he could not do it... i doubt cheaters could do it cold.

How would this be done? What kind of language, etc. would enable this?

I decided to try it.

https://gist.github.com/eli173/c089c27db9c1302fe4e003716b402...

Perhaps I am the kind of person they are trying to avoid, but I did this in a bit less than an hour. I am very ignorant of the Python library ecosystem, so if I had known the request library better and if I knew an html parsing library, I may have been able to complete this in the time limit. I also suspect there are a few cases which break my solution.

> if I knew an html parsing library

Beautiful soup https://pypi.python.org/pypi/beautifulsoup4

Wget/sh/sed/awk/perl soup

A simple shell script with curl piped through sed or awk...

Any language with support for web crawling? I can sorta see it being done in Node with cheerio[1] and an HTTP client.

[1] https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio

Would probably be my first choice these days too...

Thanks! Always good to learn new things

Some kinda javascript plugin that opens every link on the page, and then every link inside the pages following until it hits philosophy? XD

The best part is you could cap it to 5 levels of recursion before it runs away.

Still no way I'd have that in 15 minutes haha. I could describe it though!