90% of my class cheated in some form on regular exams until 10th grade. This was known by the management and teachers often hide it. They also increased marks of students by changing their answers lol. Discouraging environment for actual students.
Why?
Because education is a business. Metrics such as 90 percentile scored so and so drives admission rates.
why cheat?
Because lack of good parenting, teachers and dysfunctional infra. Most teachers outside of few top schools are "failures" (not literally) in private schools where they are spending their time trying to crack exams for government jobs or getting another degree. They don't care or aren't paid enough.
Parents won't help their kids or take much interest in what they like. They will be pretty thorough when investigating report cards and standardized bullshit metrics that indian schools make (outside of board) but shallow when empathising with their kids.
Tuition is a widely common practice in india which is similar to daycare in practice, I guess. It gives off an effect of your kid working... Whenever someone gets a bad grade, the first thing to do is increase their tuition time. My previous schools had same teachers taking tuition at home and an after school program. You will get questions and stuff that will come in exam by going there. It was public knowledge too. Most schools are shady. I can't remember one where I didn't see some bs going on like messing with paperwork for tax fraud (openly), messing with report cards, exams, board requirements, etc.
Big chunk of parents are not educated or live in poverty. Their kids will come to school and disrupt it for others but what can you do about it?
Separate them and put them into low cost classrooms? Yeah, that happens. Though it usually starts from 8th grade onwards. Until then, everyone is in the same classroom.
I think the biggest problem is we start investing in kids at a later age than we should. All their junior years, no one sets a good bar for them. They won't suddenly change as drastically as some people hope.