I don’t take many courses outside my major… but plagiarism is a big deal in our department. If you are caught, and you’ll probably get caught, you will get an automatic fail on the assignment / exam. Depending on what did, you could end up failing the class and be sent on Academic Probation. For real. It’s Serious Business to the extreme.
My professors have caught students texting exam questions. They received an automatic failure (and have since then, led our professors to a no-electronics policy regardless of whether there is an exam going on. Which saddens them, because my professors are technology-loving folks.)
They have also caught students turning in papers that a friend wrote and copying and pasting whole passages from published material (articles, books, Wikipedia.) I don’t even know you would bother to take the course if you aren’t going to do the work.
That’s why our professors stress the importance of keeping track of all the material you access when preparing for a paper and properly citing all quotations, references, rewordings – everything. If something is cited incorrectly, they will point it out to you, but aren’t going to send you to jail for it. But if you fail to cite something at all, and you get caught… well, good luck with that.
I’ve overheard too many students in my classes bitch and moan about zero tolerance cheating policies and it gets on my nerves. Just don’t cheat. No cheating, no problems. It’s not that difficult to understand.
I’m sorry for ranting. Plagiarism just makes my blood boil.