I know you chose 50/50 arbitrarily. But I think the real numbers are much worse. A few years ago, I stayed a couple nights at a hostel in a rural spot in Italy. I’m in my 50s, and most of the others there were Americans in their 20s, fairly recent grads. A dozen of us went out to dinner one night, and among the topics discussed was cheating in college. Only myself and one of the younger people said we did not cheat, the others all treated it as an expected part of the college experience. This isn’t exactly “data”, and perhaps there’s some sort of correlation between hostel-goer and cheater, but I was shocked at the numbers. And that was before LLM usage was common.

My read is it's pre- versus post-social media college experiences. There have always been a number of cheaters. But their blast radius of normalization was limited to their roommate or maybe even dorm floor. With social media, a single cheater at a single school can enable and normalize the practice for millions.