TLDR --- I ran into something similar some years ago when i had to grade exams as a grad student proctor. We had an issue where student athletes were being given crazy favoritism and privileges. It wasn't race based but a way to protect their sports team from having mass expulsion.

Long:

What ended up happening is we caught kids in the athletics program cheating in a very easy elective science class final. This class was designed for this exact type of person so they could get their required science credits with little effort. They got the final exam on day 1 of the semester. It was basically "you will learn about 100 things over the semester and on the final you need to come in and write down 10 of them." On the final we hand each person 10 blank sheets to fill out. In our department we proctors generally treated all the students as adults and gave them the benefit of the doubt around seating and using the toilet. This final starts and all the athletics students take seats at one table way up top and in the middle where it wasn't easy to access. At some point the proctors started to notice that group acting suspicious. They were basically writing up one section on the paper then sliding papers around and answering each other's tests. We decided to split up the group as we caught it but they all refused to move and it was starting to cause a scene. We ended up opting not to cause a scene so we just watched them. What they actually did was each wrote their name on 10 pages then they all swapped pages at the beginning so they would answer the same question over and over with different names. And you wouldn't notice because they only did the paper shuffle at the beginning. And you would never think of checking all 10 pages they hand in for the same name.

At the end they were coming up and started fanning out their stacks and sliding them into the piles of exams but between all of the proctors we were able to figure out all the names. It was easier because if one of them placed the papers into a pile we might get a list of 10 names. The professor and i think the department was totally on our side but the university itself stepped in and blocked us from failing the students. Basically they were looking at the idea of expelling multiple sports teams all at once and they took the power away from us to do anything about it.

If this happened to me today i might have been tempted to leak the information. At the time i actually believed them when the university claimed they were going to discipline the athletes internally & i actually was like "yeah we don't want to create a scandal for our school." Now I would say fuck this corrupt institution.