Ethics are in the eye of the beholder.

...Something nobody ever said when they were on the receiving end of someone else's poor ethics instead of the one partaking in it.

There's far less variability in the human brain than you imagine; we have a natural tendency to amplify it.

I don't believe that.

I do however agree ethics are system dependent.

The effects of unethical behavior on the system are objective however.

Many of my customers could barely compose a cogent e-mail. In most cases I was left wondering how they could possibly be admitted at whatever school they were at. Sure, my assessment of my customers was limited to a few back-and-forth e-mail exchanges, but I was usually left with the impression that they were enrolled at a school they didn't 'deserve' to be at.

Further, you're just completely discounting the agency of my customers here. They knew what they were doing, and how it devalued their education experience.

I presume they ended up enrolled in that school because there was always a way that money got them out of learning the hard lesson of failure. Case in point that they could pay someone to write papers for them.

Failure is arguably an important part of the process of learning.

Failure is the most important part in the process of learning. That statement says nothing about cheating. One could fail at cheating too, and either learn a better way of cheating or learn not to cheat. Both are fine. If you're good at cheating you might be a decent hacker because you might better see the flaws in any seemingly rigid and fixed system. People who break things often find a way to better recreate those things.

There's a thing that happens with loopholes. There's the guy that finds the loophole and tests it out for himself. Then there's the small group that follow him in if it suits their needs, and then word spreads and a good proportion of people also follow. If the loophole threatens the existing system in any way, then the upholders of that system will attempt to barricade the loophole. A few upholders might change the system itself, but that is rare.

The one guy who first used the loophole will always be on the lookout for new loopholes, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can say it's wrong, you can say it's not fair, but it's a fact of life. And by using that loophole that one guy can create change all around him. He can change it himself, or he can open the door for other people to see the change that needs to happen. Maybe it's good to patch the loophole, maybe it's good to change the system in which the loophole was found-- either way, it comes down a great deal to our explorer friend. He learns from failure too, but his goals are different and that's fine.

Sorry, but you can't claim that they both knew exactly what they were doing and that they were (forgive my paraphrasing) too stupid for it to matter.