Individuals cheating and lying is to be expected. Trust in institutions is damaged when they get away with it. The most damaging aspect of this story is that the cheats are being allowed to continue on the course.
It's important to remember that almost every cadet here was a plebe (1st year student). Plebes are under enormous pressure, and they are only just beginning the inculcation of the honor code (they've all only been there about 6 months now).
Traditionally, they are given by far the most leeway. The expectation is that going through this process will only hasten and harden their understanding of the importance of the honor code.
I recall reading stories in the news about happenings when I was cadet, and there's always invariably some nuances and details that are either incorrect, missing, or misunderstood by people not familiar with West Point.
Some cadets are also still going to go before an honor board, which may very well lead to their separation.
Without knowing more details, I trust the administration (including cadet-led) to take actions in the best interest of our country, the institution, and the Corps.
Ironically, that knowledge leads to a crisis of trust in military institutions among enlisteds.
The trust problem is critical and far ranging, but also multifaceted. It permeates not only the military but all of US society at this point. I'm honestly unsure as to the best solutions? We may only be able to restore trust with glacial change rather than sea change.
As someone who has never been in a military, I'm going to throw out a wild idea:
I can't imagine that restoring this trust will be easy as long as officers aren't drawn from the pool of enlisted men.
I'm not saying you're wrong but some supporting evidence would be good as this wasn't my experience in undergrad and isn't my experience now.
Picking different professors will also result in better grades independent of effort or knowledge. One of my math teachers literally gave everyone that showed up to an upper level class an A, and said he wanted to cover more material rather than have a final.
The most clear cut example of grades independent of learning is someone that knows the subject and is unable to test out of the class. In such cases they can get top scores without learning anything.
If you’re arguing that they reflect having learned the material at some time. I knew people with significant time pressure like a full time job that knew the material very well, but simply aimed for a lower grade on assignments as a means of managing their time. Grading on a curve means you need to find something that separates A’s from B’s when everyone learns the material and that’s often just effort.
What should devastate people's trust in educational institutions is the relationship between Harvard and Epstein. We get to watch this university, whom I'm told is full of the world's smartest people, claim it was ignorant of what was really going on.
Harvard gave a sex trafficker a security card and his own office while he paid them millions. Harvard faculty was even joining him at his parties, I find it hard to believe what he was doing was really a secret.
I'm not saying that grading is perfect -- measuring what has been learned is hard, and there can be pressure not to be too harsh overall. But this sort of corruption is, in my observation, not widespread.
If so, there's at least a little bit of pressure towards passing those students. I wouldn't even call it "corruption", just normal human bias that everyone is guilty of.
I think there are typically a handful of classes that are known to be "athlete friendly" and I can imagine pressure existing there. Indeed, here is one example I have read about:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/131523/teaching...
If the administration tried to hatch some conspiracy to inflate the grades of athletes or legacy students or whoever, ... then a quarter of the faculty would rebel, and the other three-quarters wouldn't even notice. Senior administrators send out lots of emails concerning this or that, and when they say to jump, nobody is scrambling to ask how high.
(2) AFAICT, when it does happen, it happens through known channels. e.g. there might be a few classes or majors which have a reputation as going easy on athletes, and instructors there might be asked to stay in line.
I'm not saying it never happens, but it's certainly uncommon enough that "grades are meaningless" isn't really true.
The question is how pervasive it is and how it is handled. For the most part the corruption is overstated because it is newsworthy.
As an aside, you should look into the specific facts on Harvard and Epstein [1].
https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/report-regarding...
Everybody loved Epstein right up until he got caught, and nobody had a clue what he was doing. This is the position of everybody involved with Epstein, not just Harvard. Call me dumb but I'm not buying it.
This was an arrogant waste of time, but my priorities at that time were to simultaneously max(grades) and min(effort), with the end goal being a job, and my strategy optimally satisfied those goals. In hindsight I wish that things had been designed differently to prevent gaming the system in such a way, to save me from myself, but alas they were not (and still aren't).
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/esper-pompeo-west...