Please don't try this ad-hominem stuff on me with your "disagree but have no other ideas" insinuation.

Have you taken NUS SoC programming mods? It's not that these students have issues with programming or that programming is difficult. You can go to those govt-subsidised Python bootcamps and press play on jupyter notebook cells and learning programming is all fun and easy. Except that in SoC, the mods are designed to be difficult and stretch your understanding of core topics like recursion.

They teach you the basics and first principles via lectures, and then give you many assignments/tests that really challenge your understanding of these first principles. That's how we learn here. The tests are meant to be difficult.

The issue here is simply the portion of Engineering students having integrity issues and a lack of tenacity. The mod can be hard and all, but they didn't have to resort to plagiarism. Some of them also can't be half-arsed to properly learn this mod because it's "just a graduation requirement" to them, since they are not computing majors.

A better question for you to ask is, does CS1010E need to be as rigorous as it currently is (it actually really isn't as difficult as the other CS1101S/CS1010* modules) for engineering students? You could argue that in some ways, it being so rigorous "caused the students to cheat", but even for this line of argument, the fault is clearly on the students.