Inside Higher Ed By Emma Whitford 7/8/2026
Brown University leaders’ response to the alleged cheating incident has been “meek,” the professor said.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.
His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.
“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.
He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.
More:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat
