When the company running my student accommodation not only stores the passwords for their resident portal in plain text and emails them straight to you in the case of a forgotten password. But also generates your password at sign up according to a specific general pattern...

What did You expected? It is very common among cmpanies to keep passwords in plaintext or use pattern for low-level access accounts. You won't find so many afministrative or root passwords in plaintext or pattern.

@vzrr that's somewhat understandable if what's behind the account cannot cause any major issues if meddled with, but people have payment details remembered on this system (along with personal details (home address, phone number, etc)) , so someone could fairly easily login and pay all of someone's rent all at once and overdraw their account.