Yeah. When I was a student, I got sent to an academic misconduct panel just suspected of cheating, and was told I absolutely could be expelled if they found out I had actually done it.

And sure, in reality somebody had copied my work and I could prove it, so I was fine - but at least they bothered to actually investigate in my example!

I know policies are different between institutions, but these students got caught red-handed not just plagiarising, but outright faking coursework submissions. Why is there no investigation into their previous coursework, no misconduct panel interviews, literally nothing apart from failing the specific part of the mid-term they were caught cheating on.

No wonder they don't give a damn when the punishment for being caught has so little teeth!

As you say, times have changed for the worse.

Colleges have become profit obsessed and students are the cash cows. Expulsion is bad for revenue.

Policy where I teach is that it's up to the professor's discretion, though that's mostly because it's not always as easy to prove as this. There's a boilerplate anti cheating section we have in our syllabus that says it's a reportable offense that may lead to academic probation or expulsion.

Honestly, it's also a ton of paperwork so I've just opted to fail them since usually my papers aren't so easily answered via an LLM and rather than tell them I caught them cheating, I simply point out they missed rubric item 2, 5 and 6 so it's something solid, not my speculation. But I also haven't white texted them yet, lol.

Well you see, we don't have DEI any more.

Instead we simply have literally no standards, for anyone!

That's how meritocracy works, right?

I presume that the use of gen AI is not considered plagiarism.

They probably have some kind of lame policy around "responsible use of gen AI" or something.