What's the worst punishment I can expect? Really scared at the moment

Would appreciate it if you guys could take your time to assess my predicament.

Firstly, I acknowledge what I'm about to say was something I did that was rather stupid, but in all honesty I doubt I'm the only person who's done so.

Basically I'm a third (final) year student doing Engineering. I recently submitted a piece of coursework that involved computer programming followed by qualitative analysis.

My friend and I made the code together. The lecturer however said to our class when we were handed this assignment that we shouldn't work together on this, and that it's an individual assignment, but we can 'talk about it over a drink'. However he emphasized that he was more interested in the qualitative analysis after the programming, as opposed to the programming itself.

My friend and I, having completed the code, went off and changed everything as much as we could to avoid any sort of detection.

However to my horror today, just as my lecturer was taking in my assignment I noticed I had forgotten to change a few symbols. That was really stupid of me to not double check. (yes, I know I shouldn't have worked with my friend in the first place).

The irony is, I know a number of students who went to the same lecturer for help and he would literally write half of the required code for them. And I'm talking the exact same code for a group of students seeing him at once. Could this mean he may be lenient on people working on the code together?

Anyway our qualitative analysis was done completely individually, and our reports look totally different (in fact my friend did quite a lot of extra, innovative coding on his so it should look pretty different, apart from the couple of symbols that I forgot to change).

I know I'm going to be slated for this, but I'm sure I'm not the only science/engineering student who's discretely collaborated with a classmate. What I've done isn't blatant plagiarism, it's more collusion which I know is still wrong.

Anyway my question is: given this could be my first offence and the assignment is worth 20% of one out of twelve modules this year, what sort of punishment could I expect?

I was caught cheating in a gcse french exam because it was one where you had to write an essay, memorise it and then regurgitate it in exam conditions. I was looking at the essay in my notebook which i had in my bag which was on the table because the teacher failed to maintain proper exam conditions. I was given a zero for that particular exam but the school didn't report it to the exam board because I explained that the whole thing was a shambles, the teacher was writing in english AND french like direct translations all over the whiteboard, all the posters were still up, we had our bags on the desks, weren't even told to turn our phones off or hand them in or anything etc. I know higher education is a bit different to gcse's but it sounds like your lecturer is clearly bending the rules so if they pull you up on it then you can just explain that it was a normal human reaction due to the relaxed nature of the whole thing. From their point of view they can either turn a blind eye to it or they can make a big deal out of it and in return be forced to investigate the work of the other students who were 'helped' by the lecturer and then have to investigate the lecturer and possibly the work of his other students, ultimately risking a negative impact on their statistics and their reputation. Hope this helps.

LOL *snort*