Comment by danaris

"Zero tolerance" policies like that are much more prone to the kind of excessive leniency in application that's described, precisely because the penalty for being found to have cheated is so very high.

In those cases, the academic integrity committee is much more likely to demand a very high standard of proof of cheating, and it can ironically result in more people getting away with it again and again, where, in a system with (say) a "three strikes" policy, they might be more likely to be expelled, because the committee would not hesitate to give them their first and second strikes—and after that, they're clearly a repeat offender.