No less than 106 college students at a university in western Greece handed in an identical assignment last June, according to the Athens daily "Kathimerini" on Tuesday.
The assignment was mandatory for a course entitled "Dynamic Mathematical Models", at the business administration college at the University of Patras.
The school's faculty senate then decided to punish the plagiarizing students by disqualifying them from the September exam period, meaning they couldn't sit any final exams for any course.
What followed was even more bizarre, even by modern Greek standards, as two of the biggest politically affiliated student groups at the university, one attached to center-right New Democracy party (ND), and the other with socialist PASOK, expressed their opposition to the decision, which they called unduly "harsh".
Reports had the ND-affiliated grouping, DAP-NDFK, requesting that the 106 undergraduates be excluded from retaking the specific course's final exam, but not others.
Within hours of the report surfacing in the press, ND's leadership called for the resignation of the head of the student grouping for the specific college.
