In that case, the University has some minor case to answer for having left it until the day before he was expelled to ramming it home to him that the exact thing that he was doing was actually going to cost him his degree.

Not if the day before his exams was the day on which they established that the amount of plagiarism he'd been doing was sufficient to cost him his degree. That's what I'm saying. And that seems to me to be entirely plausible, because it's that exact kind of plagiarism that is very difficult to spot.