Unrelated but: It's easy to believe that yr peers are cheating. But I believe there are a lot of hard working people that know the concequence of cheating your way through.
A long time ago at a university not far away, I and a few classmates all turned in the same report for a group project. The teacher absolutely and rightly thought we were cheating, after which we explained that we interpreted the instructions to mean that a group project would have a group paper. He seemed to accept this and gave us like an extra week to compile our own papers, but he must have smoked an extra bowl that night. I know I would have if I was a professor in that situation!
I've taught university classes, and failed students on the class for cheating. But it's true that I haven't seen anyone kicked out of a program or a university for cheating.
Anecdote: Foreign student where I went to school flat out cheated on the final. When caught, he copped to it. A humanities prof then went to bat for him, saying that it was okay to cheat where he came from. They didn't expel him.
This is a general problem with any punitive measure. There will be some false positives (unfair punishments).
I actually do know someone who was not able to get a CS degree because of 'cheating'. His story was that he was working in a group, got verbal clearance from his professor that this kind of collaboration was acceptable, and when that auto-cheating-analysis tool flagged each group members work, the professor claimed not to have said that and was uninterested in fixing the problem.
So, this absolutely does happen. OTOH, I've never personally had any experience with 'borderline' cases. There were enough cut-and-dried cases to keep me busy.
Anyone else like Bob Dylan... If people cheat, I believe there is a slow train comming.
Example: I had a friend who had an interview for company XYZ, "Write a program that clicks the first link in a wikipedia entry and exits when you reach the philosophy page (implement in the language of your choice). You have 15 mins"...
My friend was a really hard working, intelligent, and honest guy and he could not do it... i doubt cheaters could do it cold.
Perhaps I am the kind of person they are trying to avoid, but I did this in a bit less than an hour. I am very ignorant of the Python library ecosystem, so if I had known the request library better and if I knew an html parsing library, I may have been able to complete this in the time limit. I also suspect there are a few cases which break my solution.
