/lit/ - Literature

Hey mods, go fuck yourselves! A thread about a literature thread can't be less about lit than a lot of the shit you allow here. No wonder this place is such a shithole so much of the time.

Anons, I'm trying to understand the mindset that leads to and follows cheating on an exam.

Backstory: I'm marking exams from a first-year English course and find that, in one exam, more than half the content is plagiarised. It's obvious to me that there's something conspicuously different about these answers and within a few minutes I've found four different sources. The correlation between the online sources and the exam is close enough that I can formally accuse the student of academic misconduct. If this student agrees that the plagiarism has occurred, the exam will receive a grade of 0 and the student will likely fail the course.

I never cheated in uni or plagiarised, so I'm trying to understand why someone does this, whether they really think they can get away with it, and whether there's anxiety/remorse afterward.

I think I'm looking for ways to to sympathise with the student. It means additional hours of work for me and pisses me off no end.

Experiences, anons? I want to understand and, hopefully, think of a pedagogically useful way to work through this sort of thing in the future.