1/3 of Sunday school class thought cheating OK?

I’m not a real teacher - I just teach Sunday school. Thought you all might like to know something that came up in class today…

My class is 15 kids between ages 11 and 14, lower to middle income area.

Today’s unit was on morality, so I started with examples of “moral dilemmas” (they wouldn’t really be dilemmas to an adult, though, just examples to get the kids thinking.) In one example, the scenario was that during remote learning, a bunch of kids in your class find out how to cheat on tests and start getting 100s. I added that the teacher graded on a curve (to make it clear that one student cheating negatively impacts everyone else’s grade).

Several students straight up suggested solving this dilemma by cheating as well but convincing all the cheaters to get a few questions wrong so it wouldn’t look so suspicious and so everyone’s grade would be curved up. One said he’d cheat if the teacher was bad, but not if the teacher was good. This was all said enthusiastically without any self awareness that, um, Sunday school is probably not the kind of place that is going to encourage cheating? I of course brought them around to how cheating is a form of lying/stealing, and other people who actually did the work won’t get the credit they deserve if someone in the class cheats. I also mentioned how if I cheated at my day job, someone could get hurt (medicine).

I just found it surprising that this didn’t even seem to register with them as an ethical issue. They seemed to think grades didn’t matter anyways, so you might as well cheat. Is this attitude common today?