I go to one of the best (public) High Schools in the Nation. I will not name the school for obvious reasons.
I'm 16, sophomore, and cheating is normal here. I predict that at least 70% of the student population cheats, at least once a week.
Me and my friends will regularly (almost daily) exchange homework A for B. Or person A will do homework X night, while person B will do homework Y night.
I have a 3.999 GPA, so don't think I'm ignorant, and i have scored in the top 1%, in the nation, for standardized tests (No Child Left Behind Act), multiple times.
But cheating is a regular part of school now days. I do not know of what your generation thought of cheating, but my generation considers cheating completely normal, harmless, and exercises real life situations of "using/exploiting resources".
P.S. No child left behind is an utter failure, and i often find that teachers have to cram curriculum in order to accommodate tests. I wholeheartedly feel that the No Child Left Behind Act is actually lowering SAT/ACT scores. Teachers are forced to cram-teach state required curriculum, rather than in-depth lessons, necessary for full understanding. This artificially creates higher test scores for the standardized NCLB tests. On the other hand, not enough information is tought to fully reap the full benefits of the lessons; lowering ACT/SAT scores.
Furthermore, school lessons are completely irrelevant to life. Over the past X years, i have learned almost nothing that can be applied to future jobs/everyday life. I have retained virtually no information from previous years.
Our school system utterly fails. Teachers know it; students know it. So do not blame the students for taking shortcuts, as there is no reason to go through the overly stressed lifestyle of school, when there are little to very few lessons that we will use. I love being knowledgeable, i love learning about things i dont understand, but I am utterly disgusted by the idea of force-feeding irrelevant education. School should be used to teach lifelong lessons. Not information that will be memorized and quickly disposed of.