A Brown University economics professor who modified his exam format to accommodate students traumatized by a campus shooting uncovered what may be the largest AI-assisted cheating scandal in Ivy League history.
Fortune reports that Roberto Serrano, who holds the Harrison S. Kravis University Professorship in Economics at Brown University, made a compassionate decision last spring that led to an unexpected discovery about the AI cheating epidemic in higher education. After a campus shooting left two students dead and nine wounded, including members of his class, Serrano switched his advanced mathematical economics course to a take-home format to reduce stress for traumatized students.
The March 5 take-home midterm for ECON 1170, designed as a closed-book take home test, produced results that immediately raised red flags. Of the 86 students who took the exam, 40 received perfect scores of 100. The class average reached 96, dramatically higher than the typical range of 65 to 80 in previous years — despite Serrano intentionally making the exam more challenging than usual.
The evidence of AI assistance became clear when Serrano and his grading team noticed unusual patterns in answers. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” he explained. When they tested the questions through ChatGPT, they found the AI had generated a convoluted argument for a problem with a straightforward answer. That same complex reasoning appeared across dozens of submissions.
Rather than immediately voiding the results, Serrano gave students a chance to prove themselves. He announced the final would be administered in person, and if the grade distribution did not roughly mirror the midterm, only the final would count.
In a later session, he confronted his students directly. “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. So my question to you is, why are you here?” The classroom response was silence, and Serrano suspected many of the cheaters were not even present.
The aftermath proved revealing. Following his speech, 27 students dropped the course, 22 of them having scored perfect 100s on the take-home exam. When the in-person final took place, only 59 students appeared, and 19 failed. The class average plummeted to 48 out of 100, the lowest final exam average in the course’s history.
“When you put together all this information and the distributions of the two exams, it’s absolutely clear,” Serrano said. “The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming.”
Serrano, a distinguished scholar with over 6,100 citations on Google Scholar and author of widely used textbooks, reported his findings to Brown’s dean and provost. After initially receiving no response, he escalated to the university’s Academic Code Committee, which acknowledged the incident as “a wake-up call.” However, according to Serrano, the provost has maintained complete silence.
The professor, blind since age 17 and a Harvard PhD, views the situation through the lens of game theory. “I believe the arrival of AI has been like a tsunami for all of us. It’s caught everybody unprepared. But in my humble opinion, silence is the worst treatment for this problem,” he said.
He warned the consequences extend beyond grades. “If Brown continues to produce mediocre students who refuse to learn, sooner or later the market is going to find out that the Brown label is not what it used to be.” More broadly: “If workers are just going to press a button to ask an AI agent to do the work for them, that’s inscribing a world in which humanity has chosen to become idiots. We stop thinking.”
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall describes AI as having great potential on the positive side, but also having the same danger as a landmine for America’s future. One of the major tasks for America, Hall writes, is to harness AI’s positive potential in education without turning all students into cheating who don’t learn anything, as Professor Serrano fears:
But Hall’s argument is not that conservatives should reject AI in education. The opposite. He points to open-source AI solutions that allow tutors to be “customized to meet specific educational needs, beliefs, or goals. Just as school districts, private schools, or homeschool parents choose textbooks or curricula that contain certain values, customized AI tutors can be designed to include desired lessons and principles.” He cites TrekAI, a faith-based AI tutor built on a Christian worldview, as one example already in use.
Hall’s answer is engagement, not retreat. He writes in CODE RED that conservative parents need to vet AI tutors with the same scrutiny they apply to human teachers. “Leftist educational indoctrination thrives when parents remain in the dark,” he writes. The conservative economist Thomas Sowell’s warning, which Hall cites, puts the cost of inaction plainly: “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”
Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Fortune here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.