Yes, they did cheat when we were in school, as well. I used to regularly provide wrong answers to people looking over my shoulder.
However, I suspect the need and opportunity have gone up a lot since then.
Your typical middle school /junior high student has illegible writing, incoherent thinking, absolutely no clue about how to even guess at spelling, and lately an in your face attitude about their inability.
When I help grade their papers, I feel dishonest in giving them high marks for meeting the grading rubric provided (assuming they are in the top few percent who are able to do this), because they are still functionally illiterate and incapable.
If you can’t do any of these things by the time you are 10 to 12, odd are against your learning them ever.
When you find the need to actually write a paragraph and realize you can’t, the pressure is suddenly on to cheat. Add to this the despair the more intelligent (or cunning) might have over the realization that they have been cheated out of an education, and have no real hope of ever catching up within the system, it can almost become the rational seeming response. No one is teaching these children that they can become their own best teacher, and no one is teaching them the ethics that cause us to decry their choices - finding someone willing to help them cheat is almost a foregone conclusion for many of them.
Now - and I suspect that a few of these students realize this, adding to the impulse to cheat - if grades are meaningless, but still relevant, why should the methods used to obtain the desired ones matter?
I believe that as a rule, we were more competent in our generation, and so more confident that we could turn in something of our own and get a meaningful and acceptable grade for it.
No, they did not know that I knew they were looking. Very few figured this out (thankfully).