The story sounded apocryphal to me too, or maybe it evolved through re-telling and re-remembering.

Most people are in the dark about what college level music education consists of. If piano was being taught in a classroom, then it wasn't a music performance major program. Also, there are tiers of colleges, and a school with an easy music program for rich kids is not unthinkable.

I have two kids who are both music performance majors in college (yes, we had the conversation about jobs), and I'm a musician myself. I learned the scales in middle school.

A remote possibility is that this is a freak occurrence. I think you can't design a training program that absolutely bars creative cheating, without also degrading the program for the majority of students who don't cheat.