If so many kids, proportionally, are cheating, the reasonable conclusion is not that there's an abundance of 'bad seeds' but perhaps that Harvard isn't very good at getting students to take ethics seriously.
At your typical university, cheating on take-home exams is common, pressure is high, and ethics are underemphasized--is it your place to say a student reacting in the obvious and ordinary way deserves expulsion? Are kids trying to sink or swim in such an environment really deserving expulsion? Besides, more effective cheaters are less likely to be caught. The moral Harvard sends its students is not "don't cheat on a take-home exam" but "don't be caught by copy-pasting answers". The people who work together and tweak their answers to look different get A's.
Honestly, I think it's an overreaction; an institution that has been so poor at imparting academic ethics to its students is now harming the same in order to save face.
More generally, it is an anti-pattern to paint large groups of people as wrong and deserving of punishment, even if you feel the underlying ethics are correct.
At your typical university, cheating on take-home exams is common, pressure is high, and ethics are underemphasized--is it your place to say a student reacting in the obvious and ordinary way deserves expulsion? Are kids trying to sink or swim in such an environment really deserving expulsion? Besides, more effective cheaters are less likely to be caught. The moral Harvard sends its students is not "don't cheat on a take-home exam" but "don't be caught by copy-pasting answers". The people who work together and tweak their answers to look different get A's.
Honestly, I think it's an overreaction; an institution that has been so poor at imparting academic ethics to its students is now harming the same in order to save face.
More generally, it is an anti-pattern to paint large groups of people as wrong and deserving of punishment, even if you feel the underlying ethics are correct.