Many of the students in this article showed very clearly what they thought about their "rehabilitation": just another system to be gamed with lip-service and as little effort or change as possible. They won't treat it as anything else unless it hurts. I'm sorry, but you can't seriously propose to remove all punishment and be taken seriously. And I also don't think you can even seriously argue that failing a student for a class is too severe, either. It's not even necessarily denying them the degree, as long as they stop fucking cheating. That's your goal too, right?
Fine I agree with everything you have just said, its just that there was so much venom in your message before it seemed all you wanted was revenge and not interested in what the most optimal solution was. Second chances are important , had they cheated in an exam fail them but a multiple choice quiz done online with multiple retries possible at best deserves a zero. The reality though is too many of them were cheating to all be failed (speaking practically), what are you going to do, have the class with double the students next year ? If anything they should be failed for adding their teacher to the group chat and trying to cheat as a collective lol.
Yeah, well, part of the venom is because the "optimal solution" is both easy and obvious but institutions are still too cowardly to implement it. (Again, the point is to make this a consistent thing, not wait until you reach the point where 75% of the class is blatantly cheating.)
