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Thank you for a constructive disagreement. Perhaps car theft and bicycle theft would have been a better analogy, when talking about the offence (but I could not find a good analogy for the underlying problem).

"In practice, there were apparently edge cases (students with ambiguous evidence..."

These where exactly the cases that I focused on. I honestly thought I was playing in a "Numb3rs" episode. Constructing models for detecting the probability that an individual student would structure an Excel spreadsheet in a specific way, measuring likelihood of sentences using Google N-grams, and other things that are not the obvious things that the honor council would immediately understand. At the end, the students were admitting guilt but at a great personal cost for me.

When nobody else is fighting like that what is the incentive for me to continue? Not all students go through my classes, so that all have equal chance of being caught. In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness to the students for me to be as vigilant as everyone else.

I like the analogy to car theft. It communicates how shocking plagiarism should be within a healthy academic community. And stealing cars will normally attract serious attention from the police.

Of course, if you impose draconian punishments for a first offense, then you also increase the burden of proof. It's not enough to say that "student X cheated with 60% probability," any more than you could say, "It's reasonably likely that the defendant stole the car." You need to have clear-cut evidence.

One of my friends was a lecturer in the computer science department (at the honors 200 level), and he made it clear that he took cheating as a personal affront. Every year, he'd catch 2 or 3 students cheating, and he'd devote considerable time to educating the student judiciary about CS and getting the cheaters suspended. Despite this, he was an enormously popular lecturer. But he was operating within a culture where plagiarism really was a serious offense against community norms.

In a (very) perverse way, it is a matter of fairness to the students for me to be as vigilant as everyone else.

Ultimately, this fight can't be won by a single professor. It's a matter for your colleagues, your administration and even your student body: Does NYU want to be a university where cheating is shockingly unacceptable, or one where cheating is on par with a parking ticket?

At the risk of sounding naive, I think grades are overrated, to the point that they may indeed kill the spirit of learning. To make matters worse, the US system has way too many grades: quizzes, exams, assignments, extra-credit (!) assignments, finals, etc. That's a lot, particularly for a college system.

As a start, I would dare the top US universities to do away with grades and let prospective employers segregate the fine from the best without the beaten GPAs. I bet they would produce even better graduates. (The new requirement(s) for graduation would, of course, demand some creativity.)

My understanding is that top law schools do something like that already - limiting themselves to pass/fail grading across the board. The 50th percentile at, e.g., Harvard Law, is almost certainly going to be a very capable attorney, and it does Harvard Law no good to create artificial distinctions between students solely for the benefit of the outside world.

If a student wants to show some sort of distinction, he has to find some out-of-band way to do that (research for a prof, publications, exceptional internships, etc).

I believe Harvard Law has trivially obvious class rank from GPA metrics. Yale grades Pass/Fail.

Entirely possible - I can't speak to school specifics. I just know of the practice third-hand from a friend who considered transferring because he was bored with his first year elsewhere.

But in the context of academia, plagiarism is not a summary offense. Academics are rewarded primarily for the originality of their work, and plagiarism is an offense against major community norms. The appropriate response to an offense against major community norms is removal from the community.

I agree with all of that but these are undergraduates not academics. If you're not doing research you're not part of any academic community. Besides, they're business students, the proportion of people who don't give a dman about the hoops they have to get through to get the piece of paper to get the good job will be even higher than average.

tl;dr Non researchers are not part of any academic community, they are not bound by its moral code.