

It isn’t the “quality” of the piece that makes it more valuable, but the intrinsic quality of being the original. An exact, molecularly identical copy might make that messy, in that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them, but the true original is still the one with the value.
It doesn’t surprise me for college level students to not know it, but for college students in a math heavy field to not know it. Both in terms of how do they pass an entrance exam for that program, as well as how does someone that is bad in a subject decide that is the career they want?