It’s an old (and outdated IMO) tradition at some Ivy Leagues, as the article notes.
It may have worked in the era when students had a little more fear of repercussions and a little more sense that cheating on a test would only cause them problems when courses got harder later.
Now it seems there is little interest in dealing with cheating, as evidenced by how hard it was for this professor to even get attention to the matter within his department. Students also don’t believe cheating will cause them future harm because they assume they can cheat everything up through graduation the same way.
When the rug gets pulled and they have to demonstrate their knowledge in person without ChatGPT, the cheaters collapse. I fear that we’re delaying this reckoning so deep into academic careers now that by the time these students encounter the point where they can’t cheat their way to completion of a course they’re in for a world of hurt, if they continue at all. We really should be coming down hard on cheating earlier and more often.