My students cheated... a lot

In freshman engineering courses [*], students would gather and do the assignments. They would divide and conquer questions, sharing answers. This was definitely cheating. (I didn't participate. But I didn't seriously consider reporting it either; I wanted to have friends...) The assignments were repetitive and stupid, so this was a rational if dishonest coping strategy. TAs certainly knew this happened. I had a bad habit of skipping dumb assignments. One TA actually emailed me something along the lines of "why don't you just cheat like everyone else".

In physics classes, students would gather and do the assignments. They would each do all the work. When someone got stuck, others would suggest techniques, help them where they were stuck, etc. Collaborative and honest. The assignments had far fewer problems, each unique and involved, done from first principles. Homework was graded on showing (extensive) work as well as the answers. If folks had skipped/copied problems, they would have missed out on great learning opportunities and likely flunked the exams even if they weren't caught.

In computer science classes, I don't recall students gathering to do the assignments. Maybe I just wasn't part of the group. (Many of my friends were in engineering, and most of my academic time was spent in the physics building.) Maybe they just didn't work together, similar to what you observed. What I do know is that a lot of students had very little understanding, and I was surprised they got degrees.

Of course, I prefer the physics approach. It's probably not a discipline-wide thing though as much as that my school had a great physics department and a lousy CS department. More similarities than I expected in your story, though, despite presumably different schools and times.

[*] I dropped my electrical/computer engineering major after freshman year. I graduated with a comp sci major + physics minor. Maybe later engineering courses were different.

If a class can be passed by this kind of cheating, it‘s a shit class, simple as that.

Classes need to be designed with the knowledge in mind, that the modern student is a highly social, cooperative creature that grew up with cheating being completely normal.

I designed classes by 80% of credit being given for big, final projects and the verbal, live „defensio style“ explanation they had to do for their projects, with me asking class general and project specific questions that made detecting fraud and grading very easy.

Your saving grace might be that you actually managed to create a somewhat more engaging and useful class after all. But besides that, your behavior was sadistic and frankly, inhumane.

I could be wrong but I don't think this happens that often. If you cheated enough not to understand what was going on in calc 1 may god rest your soul as 2 and 3 are going to be downright impossible. For those types of classes you need to mostly understand the material even have a chance at cheating successfully.