I'd say I was surprised but my first year of grad school I was a TA and caught two kids cheating. One student accidentally (maybe needs quotes? I'm unsure tbh) had his GitHub repo set to public. Two other students found it and just copy pasted his work. We had a meeting with the professor and he yelled at them about how the syllabus says you can't copy anything off the internet. I shit you not, the students' (juniors) excuse was "I didn't know GitHub was 'on the internet'". My jaw dropped. I looked at the professor and the only way I can describe it is that this dude had to do a full reboot. Like halt and catch fire situation. I swear I saw the gears stop moving in his head as he was trying to comprehend one of the stupidest things either of us have ever heard. Professor tried to get them expelled. Best we could do is give them a 0 on the assignment. And that's how I learned about the cheating metric... In the next class the prof mentioned if we catch anyone cheating again he's going to flunk even the person that work was being copied off of. Those students didn't pass and even without saying their names I saw them get kicked out of their social circles real quick. So students knew... and man they got paranoid...

The next year, my advisor pulled me aside. He talked about how some student said they didn't know GitHub was on the internet. I thought he was talking about my experience. Turns out he wasn't... He was talking about two other students, who he talked with independently, and were in his sophomore level class.

This was pre-covid btw. The other story was post. Things only got worse post and I heard similar stories from friends in other departments and other universities. A friend of mine teaching history on the other side of the country had Freshmen who failed an assignment that was "call the library, go check out a book."

So I think this context should help in understanding the actual problem here. I do think GPT is a problem. But like I said, I think the actual problem runs much deeper. Kids were turning off their brains before that... But it was definitely a very sharp drop with covid and another sharp drop after 3.5 came out.