Yeah, I remember in a freshman lab that I was TAing for I spotted an assignment that was clearly a bad photocopy of an email (complete with email address at the

Yeah, I remember in a freshman lab that I was TAing for I spotted an assignment that was clearly a bad photocopy of an email (complete with email address at the bottom), which wasn't the student's email. So I went and found a name that matched up with that email, which was another student, and at that point I felt the need to look through all the assignments looking for this particular copy's calling card, a strange rounding error on one of the tables. Ended up finding about a dozen cases of cheating on that prelab, alone. A prelab worth, generously, half of a percent of their overall grade. Let the professor know, finished grading the rest. Next week I had a dozen more missing assignments than usual, went to the professor asking "hey, why did a quarter of the class not turn in their assignments this week?", and they replied that the students had been served an ultimatum: Drop engineering, go transfer somewhere else in shame, or get hit with an academic dishonesty inquiry, which could carry much stiffer sentences. They all took the former. The theory was that students cheat because they're either unwilling or unable to engage with the material, which means they're not cut out for engineering.