Comment by vincent-manis

I have no opinion on the validity of this claim, but I do know that many students do not read things. I taught university level computer science for over 30 years. On midterms, I would embed phrases such as “print OKAPI on the top of page 2 for an extra mark” in the exam instructions. About 40% of students followed this instruction, even though I did this for years, and you'd have thought students would tell their friends. But they didn't.

I could go on about cheating rings that encompassed entire classes (I never saw this myself, but have read authenticated reports of it.) I know of a case where a class writing an exam had teaching assistants writing the exam answers on the blackboard at the front of the room.

The CS students I taught were a highly motivated group overall. But perhaps these students were in a course they didn't want to take, resentful of being made to study things they weren't interested in, because it was a program requirement. (I taught service courses, I know that mentality.) Then it is entirely plausible to me that they might cut and paste an answer without even looking at it, or an executive summary that appears there.

I first discovered that not all students are fussy about the work they hand in, back in the late 1960s, when I was a marker for a course that taught some Cobol. The lab was a payroll program, and I saw several students hand in programs that computed pay as $2.00/hour times 40 hours equals something like $-123456.78. I asked them, when I gave them their work back, if they had looked at their output. They were all surprised that I'd expect that.

Lest there be any misunderstanding, I taught many highly motivated students who worked hard and cared very much about their work. But I did deal with many incidents of cheating in my career too.