I haven't seen anyone mention grade inflation yet, which I've always thought was deeply related to cheating. Obviously undergraduate GPA is a useful metric for aspiring academics, but I don't understand why everyone else is encouraged to care so much about it. I would rather our undergraduate institutions acknowledge that most students are busy learning a variety of lessons inside and outside the classroom and present those students with honorable paths to lesser commitment. Maybe systems split along mastery, competence, and familiarity (and failure). A world where it is perfectly normal for a future web dev to phone it in on a surface-level track for algorithms, but a future civil engineer is completing oral exams in statics to prove mastery.

Nobody _wants_ to cheat. Personally I really regret all the shenanigans I pulled in college to clear hurdles when I felt I had no other option. I wish I would have spoken more frankly with the professor and worked out some way to write some papers or do a project for an honest (and interesting!) C rather than keep killing myself gaming the problem sets for the B+ that was expected of me in classes I wasn't a good fit for.