The problem with widespread cheating even if you don't cheat yourself is it essentially reduces the credit rating of your $50k program and has knock on effects elsewhere, like worse interview loops. And if the 'cheater's workload' becomes the norm, you the non-cheater can be literally failed out of programs and scholarships because you didn't keep up.

At what point does "not keeping up with the cheaters" become "There is a more efficient way to do the task and this student's grade reflects they are choosing the inefficient approach?"

I'm reminded of the stories of employees getting busted because they were assigned a job so trivially automatable they either did automate it or they used some find-labor service to delegate it for a fraction of the cost out of their own pockets, who are then accused by the company of "not working."

It's the same logic of letting a machine do a gym exercise vs doing it yourself, you're missing the point of it, because otherwise the gym exercise is mostly useless.

> I've seen plenty of cheaters, they were the worst students

In other words, you haven't seen the "cheaters" who were among the best students.

"cheaters" in quotes because it's not clear to me that people using freely available resources when doing homework are really cheaters. If an instructor wants to do a closed-book exam, they can do just that.

> In other words, you haven't seen the "cheaters" who were among the best students.

If they were able to fool everyone to the point of being considered good students, it means they weren't cheaters, just that they had a different approach to problems than others (which is kinda what you say after).