Answer:
The thing with exams, is that they just keep getting harder, and the consequences get more severe. Many people find themselves unable to pursue a career they want because they cannot score high on some test, and they blame the whole stupid system - but they did have 12+ years to practice taking tests.
It seems to arbitrary as a kid, but cheating tactics exist and change at all levels of education - there's not really any cumulative benefit to working on your cheating, and there's not a skill barrier to getting into cheating.
Tests on the other hand are a very arbitrary system, and the skill of taking tests can be trained. If you want to cheat, then study up on exam skills and memory tricks and studying tools. Then learn great ways to score highly on exams and it will be all the fun of cheating but you're never getting in trouble or stressed about getting caught.
In a very...amoralistic sorta way one could consider cheating to be your 'ace in the hole' sorta like steroids and athletic performance. It may be enough to push you to the next level, but if you do it early then you will never have the chance to benefit quite that much again - reputations of academic dishonesty follow you, and getting caught at the very least shows future employers that your discretion is lacking.
In that sense it is probably worthwhile to get as good at school and exams as possible, and only consider cheating when there is some life and death situation on the line and it is justifiable. Cheating is a real strategy, but it has real risks.
If you think of vegas, cheating is like trying to look at someone elses cards, or coordinate a strategy to get money out of a Casino. The casino knows you want to do this and is looking for you to do that. Now if you count cards like that recent movie about the MIT kids, there is nothing physically different about what you do - but you stack the odds in y our favor and can get on a seriously bad side of some Casinos if you are caught doing it.
Now here's the neat thing about tests - you can make way more money by being good at tests than you can by being good at counting cards (with a few notable exceptions) and you're supposed to be counting cards for the exam! The whole idea of the exam is to force you to prepare, and find some way to allow you to prove that you have mastered the material.
Exams will follow you through every stage of life, so getting good at them is an investment, and like I said it never gets easier. Like...try and fail and work new strategies all you want until your last 2 years of highschool - there's no significant consequences for failure at that point. From there forward your future really is on the line, cheat in highschool and you are at the mercy of your administrators and later the admissions officials opinion of cheaters.
