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.