For some more context, I've seen many threads on Reddit that typify an adversarial system. The posters would brag about cheating, and would justify it by saying the course material was bullshit and the professors were unreasonable and the degree was just gatekeeping. They'd describe the arms race between students figuring out new ways to cheat and the effort expended by the professors to thwart cheating.

At Caltech, it was effortless to cheat and professors made no attempt to thwart it. (That said, if two exam papers came back with the same mistakes, the students would still have some 'splainin' to do.)

The students all knew each other (being a small university) and the A students were often asked to help out the struggling students (I got a lot of help this way), and so it was pretty obvious to spot an A student who didn't actually master the material. You knew they earned it.