Never said they didn’t know it wasn’t allowed. I said that the teachers view of cheating is flawed. I’m also not saying the students aren’t*** (autocorrect likes to change my contractions to the exact opposite) guiltless. My point was that young people make mistakes, and teacher should use this as a teachable moment about the difference between cheating and collaborating. Between just copying code, and knowing how what you copied works. These are students they are still learning. Also, an over 20% fail rate is abysmal and speaks to how poor of a teacher this professor is.
The point of the (probably fake) story is that there was a massive issue with cheating.
When we run through the cheating software at my uni it give you a percentage of how much of this paper is copied (quotes.etc) from previous work. In some first year this gets as high as 30% - not because of cheating, but because everyone us running from the same text book, same readings and same template… and when you are discussing historic theories not much has really changed in the last 50 years for first years. But there is a massive difference between writing something similar to the other 300 students and copying a block of work - was it understood, did it flow correctly… or did they copy the Wikipedia article?
You are correct, young people make mistakes. But if this is a capstone course its likely third year - the time for a teachable moment was 20 papers ago.
You’re assuming good faith and willingness to learn/change in the part of the students. I was a TA at a private US uni for the not so smart kids of rich parents. Our approach (imposed by admin) was all carrots all the time. 20% seems fair, even low, for the share of students who were there to get a degree with the least amount of effort necessary and then get a job thanks to the uni’s name and their connections.