At minimum, anyone who is caught plagiarizing in one of my classes receives no credit for the plagiarized assignment. This is true no matter how remorseful the student may be. If I am not convinced that leniency is called for, then the student will also fail the course. Note that I do not tell the student that their plagiarism has resulted in a failing grade until the semester is over. Making them continue the course when they will not receive credit for it is part of the punishment. Finally, I will turn the case over to the university’s academic integrity committee if I think there is sufficient evidence for a conviction. In most cases, however, I do not take this last step as the university is loathe to expel people these days if they don’t have enough evidence to combat a lawsuit.
@poisonedantidote The big deal is that academia lacks some of the incentives that other professions have (and has incentives that other professions lack). Ideas are our currency, and plagiarism is theft of that currency. Plagiarism is an attack on our academic reputation. It can make an original or innovative idea look commonplace.
Let’s say I’m traveling from university to university presenting a paper in progress and gathering comments for what revisions I need to make before publishing. I might put that paper online for people to read in advance. But if some undergraduate takes my paper and plagiarizes it for his class, and if his professor is an adjudicator for the journal to which I eventually submit the paper, I might wind up rejected because he thinks “how original or groundbreaking could this be when one of my undergraduate students came up with the same argument last semester?”
I’m not saying this is a likely scenario, nor is it the entire justification for taking plagiarism seriously. But it is at least one consideration that might convince you given the fact that you don’t seem prepared to take academic values seriously.
P.S. Academia is the real world. We have to deal with the same economic realities as everyone else, the same conflicts between administrators and productive employees, and so forth.