I'm sympathetic to the idea that society treating people with university degrees better than those without is harmful in a sociological sense and likely to increase cheating in universities. I'm less sympathetic to individual students actually cheating in the manner described.

The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers.

> Were they copying someone else's tests?

Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.