Case description
Student A, upon failing to meet a deadline for an individual take-home test, copied the solution of student B, who had been careless enough to put it on a publicly accessible repository, without knowledge of B. This was detected; A admitted his fault immediately, upon which the case was referred to the Examination Board.
Before the Examination Board had come to a verdict, the same student A, now working together with another student C on another project for the same study unit, repeated his plagiarism by again copying solutions from an open repository of student D. This was done without knowledge of either C or D. When confronted with the evidence, A once more immediately admitted his actions, claiming full responsibility.
Proceedings
Because A admitted his fraud immediately, the facts of the matter are clear. The course unit reader contains a description of what constitutes fraud that includes exactly the case of copying from an open repository.
Students are warned not to put solutions to tests and projects on an open repository, with the explicit statement that doing so may make them accessories to this type of plagiarism. Awareness of this is, however, still low.
Outcome
Although A admitted his fault the first time around, he clearly still did not understand or appreciate the severity of his actions. For the first instance of fraud, the sanction was to declare the test results invalid, meaning that he could not pass the study unit any more. For the second instance of fraud, the sanction was to bar the student from taking any examination during the next quarter.