Your moralizing and virtue signalling is missing the point.
Cheating, or academic integrity, or "over collaboration" is not a binary action that evil students take, and good student don't.
Instead, cheating is a culture, and institution. And looking at it, in this way, provides a much more helpful framework for solving it, than overmoralizing it, and simply calling cheaters bad.
The reality is, that how much students work together, or are allowed to work together, is a culture that is vastly different on a class by class basis. There are some classes, where the professors explicitly encourage collaboration among students, to the point where the profesor straight up expects that everyone is copying everyone else's homework, and that is OK and encouraged, officially.
And then there are other classes, where talking to anyone else, or asking a single question about homework, is automatically cheating.
And then there are further complications, where there is no official policy on collaboration, and everyone just guesses about what is allowed.
This vast difference between classes and collaboration culture, means that regular people, who would otherwise not cheat at all, will often do so, due to problems with the culture and expectation of the class.
And the way to solve this, is not to engage in extreme moralization, instead it is to set clear guidelines, and address problems as they come up, so things don't get out of control.
Or, in other words, if everyone is doing something, then other people will start to think that it isn't even against the rules and also do it themselves, and the blame is more on the culture and system, than it is on the individuals.
"Clear guidelines" or standards were not the issue here. They were directly copying answers from each other. There is no chance anyone honestly thought this was ok. That goes triple for the ones plagiarizing their apology letters.
And as I said in my other reply, letting "culture" grow up is part of the problem that lack of punishment creates, and was never a true excuse at all. They knew.
I heard you the first time. I've been in those classes. It's still irrelevant to this case.
Even if you're claiming the students were genuinely unsure whether they were doing something wrong, that can only possibly hold before the first quiz when the prof told them outright he didn't approve (in fact, even during that lecture their messages showed they knew he wouldn't, but let's ignore that for the sake of argument). After that, when they still tried to cheat in the second quiz, and continuing even after that failure, they have not the faintest excuse.
Cheating, or academic integrity, or "over collaboration" is not a binary action that evil students take, and good student don't.
Instead, cheating is a culture, and institution. And looking at it, in this way, provides a much more helpful framework for solving it, than overmoralizing it, and simply calling cheaters bad.
The reality is, that how much students work together, or are allowed to work together, is a culture that is vastly different on a class by class basis. There are some classes, where the professors explicitly encourage collaboration among students, to the point where the profesor straight up expects that everyone is copying everyone else's homework, and that is OK and encouraged, officially.
And then there are other classes, where talking to anyone else, or asking a single question about homework, is automatically cheating.
And then there are further complications, where there is no official policy on collaboration, and everyone just guesses about what is allowed.
This vast difference between classes and collaboration culture, means that regular people, who would otherwise not cheat at all, will often do so, due to problems with the culture and expectation of the class.
And the way to solve this, is not to engage in extreme moralization, instead it is to set clear guidelines, and address problems as they come up, so things don't get out of control.
Or, in other words, if everyone is doing something, then other people will start to think that it isn't even against the rules and also do it themselves, and the blame is more on the culture and system, than it is on the individuals.