An athlete playing a sport will always take a competitive advantage if they can get away with it, whether spitting on a baseball or crying out that another player fouled you so your team can get a penalty kick, you’re just taking every advantage available to you. We did essentially the same thing, just in a classroom.
Maybe when I first came to college I “wanted to learn”, but when we all started “cheating” that mentality was long gone and replaced with “I need a CS degree and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get it”.
And I’d say this “cheating” probably taught us more about the real world than those classes. It was an exercise in accomplishing a task by thinking outside the box and getting it done by whatever means necessary.
And some of the best professors I had understood this. They had one professor who gave us an exam and allowed us to use whatever tools or resources we wanted, his line was always "if you don't know it, nothing will save you".