A large proportion of the students we've caught cheating in our course (I'm a full-time assistant for a first-year CS course) are international students. This is a global phenomenon, not a US-specific one.

For every politician who is in the news for 'bragging' about not paying taxes, there's usually at least one politician finger-wagging at them that avoids taxes to the same extent, but is just 'quiet' about it.

People who are decrying cheating while cheating themselves are a far larger problem; when someone boasts they don't pay taxes, everyone else can point at them and go 'what an asshole!'. But when people discover someone doesn't pay taxes, yet goes after those who are public about not doing so, -that- is when the idea that 'everybody cheats'. becomes cemented.

Speaking from my former job as "professor", the problem with cheating is that students are not benefitting from the work of others. They think they are, because they think the product of the class is a grade. But I taught math. This point of view is only successful if one can maintain the cheating throughout all classes and then one's job, which is an awful lot of work and in fact even harder than just learning the d(*& math.

From my point of view, I tried to use psychology to "trick" students into learning when they were inclined to cheat -- making the process of iteration into something worth points (you don't show me an imperfect MVP and then improve it? you don't get points), making acknowledgement of collaboration and outside sources into something worth points, etc. I also provided old copies of all my exams going back several years, some with answers, because I wanted all students to have an equal playing field. Last, I always included a question or two very similar to/identical to a question on a previous exam or homework. You might think this is just bad teaching, but it was actually a quite useful tool: since I telegraphed it beforehand, students actually studied the old tests/homework, thereby accidentally learning something, and then when a surprising number of students did terribly on something word-by-word from a previous test, we got to talk about effective learning techniques.

Cheating is relatively predictable in character. Use the impulses and mechanisms gently against reluctant students to trick them into learning despite themselves. It's way more fun than the alternative.

In my university experience, the first day of every class starts with administrivia, which includes the grading policy, homework policy, and what degree of cooperation actually constitutes cheating. In CS, the usual threshold for cheating is whether or not you actually wrote the code yourself--you can (and are encouraged to!) work with other people to discuss how to solve the problem, but you have to sit down and actually write the code up yourself.

That said, as a TA, I found that I really didn't want to put any effort to identify if students were cheating. I did catch a few cheaters, but largely because they inadvertently broke my grading setup in ways that made me suspicious that they were getting their code from something other than the homework assignment.

For every person boasting about greed and "winning," there are tens or hundreds more talking about peace, love, charity, and helping others. It's in TV sitcoms, it's in books, web sites, music, it's everywhere. Have you tuned it out?