Hmm I think one part every commenter is missing is that students have grown way more mercenary and cynical over the last 20 years. I was shocked in grad school that:

a) I got bullied into sharing my math homework so people could copy it, just like high school and college... but this was math grad school!

b) In 2011 I TAed a 4000-level course where the instructor left the solutions to the homework online (he wrote the book). I estimate 95% of students copied the solutions. It was only 5% of the grade and they paid for it on the exams. Still. Kind of stunning to see at U Waterloo - it was a continuous optimization course and most of them wanted to work in finance, yikes.

▲

zer00eyz 6 hours ago | parent [-]

We're talking about Brown students here.

Im going to guess that it is a safe bet that the 50 cheaters are all legacy enrollments.

1/2 of the graduating class is there for the education, the other half is there because the parents are keeping up the network.

	▲	anonbruno 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.