Brown Professor Warns AI Is Making Students Dumber After Cheating Scandal

Interesting artifical intelligence, brown, cheating, ivy league admin July 10, 2026 0 Comments

Brown Professor Warns AI Is Making Students Dumber After Cheating Scandal

A Brown University economics professor says a take-home exam intended to accommodate students traumatized by a campus tragedy instead exposed what he believes is one of the largest artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted cheating scandals in Ivy League history.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Brown economics professor Roberto Serrano said he became convinced that widespread AI use had occurred after students in his Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory course earned unusually high scores on a take-home midterm administered during the spring semester.

Serrano had converted the exam from an in-person test to a take-home assignment after the December shooting at Brown University that killed two students, hoping to reduce stress for students still dealing with the aftermath of the tragedy.

Surprisingly, 40 of the 86 students in the class received perfect or nearly perfect scores on the midterm, resulting in an average grade of 96 percent, reported Inside Higher Ed. Serrano said previous versions of the course typically produced midterm averages between 65 and 80 percent.

He also highlighted that this version was intentionally more difficult as a take-home is an “opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more,” and students have unlimited time to complete it. (RELATED: Americans Feel Way More Worried Than Excited About AI)

Serrano told the outlet that he and his teaching assistants compared several student responses with ChatGPT outputs and found similar wording and reasoning, leading him to suspect that many students had relied on AI rather than completing the work independently.

Rather than immediately discarding the midterm results, Serrano announced that the May final exam would be administered in person.

“If the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm,” Serrano’s message to his class read, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

The publication reported that several students dropped the course following this message. Among those who stayed and completed the exam, the average score fell to roughly 48 percent, with 19 students failing the course.

Of the 59 students who took the exam, only two appear to have midterm scores comparable to their final exam scores. Student one received a 95.5 on the midterm and a 95 on the final. Student 22, the only one to do better on the final than the midterm, received a 55 on the midterm and a 59 on the final.

After collecting the results, Serrano submitted the data to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and heard nothing. He later went public with the story in June, prompting Brown officials to request that formal academic integrity complaints be filed against each student suspected of violating university policies.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Serrano became frustrated with the university’s response to the incident and ultimately decided to speak publicly about the case after concluding that colleges need to confront the challenges posed by generative AI more directly.

The allegations from Serrano’s classroom emerged as a Brown University committee on generative AI in teaching and learning was reviewing the technology’s growing role on campus and preparing a for how the university should respond.

The report suggested that professors should avoid giving students assignments that involve many rules and should “de-emphasize punishment.” (RELATED: Blue City’s Public Schools Light Money On Fire Only For Students To Keep Failing, Report Shows)

“The University should avoid highly restrictive and punitive rules around GenAI use,” the report states. “There is no way to check with 100% accuracy whether GenAI has been employed, and norms are likely to change in the years to come.”

When Serrano returned to class after the final, he asked students why they were at a university if they were just going to cheat.

“So, my question to you is, why are you here?” he asked the class, according to Fortune. “Why are you at a university if you refuse to learn, you refuse to work hard, if you refuse to put in the necessary effort to develop critical thinking?”

Serrano told Inside Higher Ed that colleges and universities need to address AI-related cheating as generative artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent in higher education.

“We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK,” he said. “We cannot choose to become idiots.”