Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI To Cheat
7 107Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Inside Higher Ed: For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so "it was appropriate," he said, to allow students to take their exams at home. But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it.
Administrators' response to the widespread cheating event has been "meek," he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can -- and should -- respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale. "I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong," he wrote. "That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly." Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent -- by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.
7 comments
Cheating is too easy (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Ksevio ( 865461 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:12PM (#66232138)
First of all, props to student 22 who clearly didn't cheat on the midterm and managed to do better on the final, but it looks like about 85 out of 89 students cheated.
With cheating being so easy, professors really need to be having in-person tests to see if the students are learning anything. I wonder if giving students the exact same test out of class and then in class would show who cheated more clearly
Re:Cheating is too easy (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Charlotte ( 16886 ) on Saturday July 11, 2026 @12:20AM (#66232362)
I honestly don't see the problem here. They did homework, cheated. Then they got the real test and failed.
So the system worked!
Re:The death of homework (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) on <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Friday July 10, 2026 @08:11PM (#66232196)
Homework is for practice. It is for students to exercise the knowledge they have gained. To fix it in their minds as more than a passing thought. To enhance retention of the materiel. Listen to the lecture, read the book, practice the exercise... retain the knowledge.
There is no point to grading homework. Except as a feedback loop for the students. So that they know what they thought they understood -but did not.
In class time is for lectures, discussions, and Q&A. Don't waste the interactive time doing things that can be done solo.
Part of a bigger crisis in education (Score: 5, Interesting)
by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:43PM (#66232174)
There is a fundamental crisis going on in colleges that has nothing to do with AI.
The professor wants a classroom full of students who actually care about what he has to teach. The administration wants those students, their paying customers, to keep paying.
Universities have had this crisis brewing for a long time:
We made a college degree necessary for most desirable jobs. Universities loved this, college degrees grew at a massive rate, the cost of them grew even more.
Then all at once they realize that hey, the students who are there, don't actually *want* to be there. They just want to buy their diplomas and get out, and act accordingly.
They can't have it both ways, this tension has been a thing for a long time.
Something fundamental has to give.
Re: not really (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @10:10PM (#66232296)
I remember being a college student....many years ago....
I was really into computer science, and also philosophy. I took those classes with great eagerness. Oh and foreign language too.
I couldn't care less about the other crap they required me to take in order to make my education well-rounded. Physics just didn't do it for me. I was a native English speaker already and learned nothing from the lit and creative writing classes. There was Art appreciation, mythology, some phys ed...all blow off classes that I took only because they were required. I am sure those professors found me unmotivated. Oh, economics was tolerable, but I never would have taken it without having been forced, and learned nothing useful beyond the high-school level economics I had already taken.
It's all different now. I read up on all kinds of brainy topics just for fun, including the stuff I blew off in college. I realize I am just one data point, but it seems consistent with available evidence: college-age kids are, by and large, sick of school and only motivated to chase their specific passions. Forcing well-roundedness on them is mostly just a way of forcing them to spend more money on elements of an education that they won't retain or use in their chosen career paths. Offer well-rounded educations only to those who seek it, and we will see engagement increase across the board.
If we are truly worried about people being unprepared to face the adult world, we should be teaching classes in investing and personal finance management, nutrition, only the most basic phys ed (how to jog and lift weights), maybe some household maintenance. These are all practical skills that we are supposed to learn from our parents, but often don't. Maybe some schools teach some of this these days, but they didn't when I was in school. Well they did teach phys ed but way over did it. Forcing kids who don't like sports to play sports is not helping them. Teaching people why aerobic exercise is good and how to lift weights with proper form absolutely is helping them.
Re:"Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory" (Score: 5, Informative)
by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:14PM (#66232140)
Even if you hate welfare, and want to kill everyone on it - studying the economics of it will help you do that.
Also, this is not about a Brown professor, it's about Brown students.
Re:"Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory" (Score: 5, Informative)
by quenda ( 644621 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @09:18PM (#66232252)
I must admit, the title of the course sounds a bit political, but I thought best to look it up before leaping wildly to conclusions:
While the words "welfare" and "social choice" might sound like political buzzwords to a layperson, in academia they refer to highly formal, mathematical subfields of standard microeconomic theory.
Taught for decades by Professor Roberto Serrano, it is known as a rigorous, proof-heavy class rather than a political forum. If you recently heard about the class in the news, it is likely due to an academic integrity controversy involving a take-home exam and suspected student use of generative AI, rather than anything related to politics.