You are going to love this story! There was a girl in one of my son’s classes that cheated during a midterm. Guess how the teacher knew? Well, not only were all the answers exactly the same BUT she actually wrote the other student’s name on top of her paper. Bwahahaha! What a maroon!
I sense that a lot of students have difficulty reading well enough to garner the information necessary to be successful in college. They can read, but not well. It must be an awful feeling to be at such a disadvantage that they feel compelled to cheat. Not every cheater is a lazy slacker. Some, I suspect, are feeling truly desperate.
My wife's a professor and assigns lots of papers, take-home essays, etc. She'll sit on the couch grading papers and notice a phrase or sentence that seems too well written or uncharacteristic of some particular student. She sticks the sentence into Google and up pops the document they plagiarized.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel.