I don't see a point in blaming students for cheating, or trying to give them a guilty conscious about how they are impacting students in curve grading scenarios

I don't see a point in blaming students for cheating, or trying to give them a guilty conscious about how they are impacting students in curve grading scenarios. The moral indignation that I'm seeing in the comments about this issue is just silly as the students are just acting the way humans act. Especially given the fact that most students are in their late teens or early 20's. Cheating is just human nature, especially that some people see a degree a gateway to success or even as survival (no degree no job, no job no food). And as survival machines, like all beings, people will do whatever it takes to get a degree, including cheating least of all. While college is an academic institution that is supposed to be about acquiring knowledge, the fact that almost every well paying job requires a degree perverses the incentives leading it to be a place where you get a diploma so you can move on with your life. So should we just tolerate cheating, with all this in mind? No, I think the burden of preventing cheating should be on the schools themselves to design testing in a way that makes cheating harder than actually learning the subject and to make learning more engaging even for those who are there just to get a diploma. This is hard of course. An even better solution would be to fix our current system that creates these perverse incentives. But that is even harder and I can't even phantom how that would be done.