Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano Finds Largest AI Cheating Scandal After ECON 1170 Midterm Review

Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano said he detected what he described as the largest AI cheating scandal in Ivy League history after reviewing a March midterm exam in ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics.

Serrano told El País that “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” and he said the midterm produced 40 perfect scores out of 86 students with a class average of 96 out of 100.

Ars Technica

He said the average score of an in-person final, which accounted for half of the final grade, collapsed to 48 out of 100, and he pointed to 27 students who did not show up for the final but had scored a 100 on the midterm.

Fortune reported that Serrano changed the midterm format after the December 13 massacre at Brown University, recalling that he had spoken with Ella Cook days before the attack and then saw her name among the “two mortal victims.”

El País reported that when Serrano told high-ranking officials at Brown, “The response from the provost, he said, was absolute silence,” and it said the dean did not comment until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee.

At that point, El País said Serrano received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call,” while Fortune described Serrano’s reaction to what he found as “absolutely ridiculous.”

EL PAÍS English

Fortune said Serrano told his students that “If you did this, if you just press a button to ask an AI agent to do this for you, you’re showing to be completely irrelevant,” and it reported that when asked about the initial reaction from his students, Serrano answered with “silence.”

The Times of India added that Brown’s VP for news and strategic campus communications, Brian E Clark, told Business Insider that Serrano shared details with the university’s standing committee on the academic code on July 8, and that “Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness.”

El País said Serrano, who is described as the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, argued that “Academic integrity is a value worth defending,” and he said the faculty “cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education.”

“When Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano changed the format of his midterm exam last spring, he was thinking about his students’ mental health, not academic fraud”

Fortune

Futurism reported that Serrano decided to stop giving take-home exams altogether, and it said Princeton recently stopped a 133-year-old “Honor Code” tradition after an “uptick of AI use and academic dishonesty in the classroom.”

The Times of India reported that after Serrano told students the final would be in-person, 27 students dropped the course, and it said 22 of those had scored 100 on the take-home midterm.

Futurism also reported that Serrano said “The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming,” and it described his warning that the “use of the tools is destroying their students’ ability to think critically” as the scandal raises questions about how universities handle AI-assisted cheating.