Blind professor at Brown University uncovers massive AI cheating scandal, saying it should be a wake-up call after scores dropped from 100 to 48
Brown University professor Roberto Serrano is allowing students to take midterm exams at home as the shock of the Dec. 13 shooting at the university remains. Serrano, who has taught at the Ivy League for 34 years, allowed mathematical economics students to take the test at home for the first time because of their mental health and the shock and trauma they experienced.Of the 86 students who took the exam on March 5, 40 received a perfect score of 100. The class average score was 96 points, while the average score in previous years ranged from 65 to 80 points, but this time the exam was more difficult.Serrano said that as he was looking through the files, he realized something very unusual was going on. “Some of the answers contained unusual passages that matched the results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” Serrano said. But he did not give up on the midterm exam and said the final exam will be a live exam.
“Why go to college if you refuse to study”
After Serrano discovered the AI was cheating, he yelled at his students. “If you do that, if you just push a button and ask an AI agent to do it for you, you become completely irrelevant. So my question to you is, why are you here? If you refuse to learn, you refuse to work hard, if you refuse to put in the effort necessary to develop critical thinking, why are you in college?” Serrano told his students.“If all you do is push a button and let this machine do the work for you, do you think you need a degree from Brown?”On the in-person final exam, the class average dropped from 100 points to 48 points. In addition, only 59 people took the in-person exam and 19 failed. When he said final exams would be held in person, 27 students withdrew from the course. Among them, 22 people scored 100 points in the home test.Brian E Clark, Brown’s vice president for news and strategic campus communications, told Business Insider that Serrano shared details of the academic code with the university’s Standing Committee on July 8. The committee “moved forward in accordance with its procedures.” “Brown takes every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness,” Clark wrote.Serrano said this is a wake-up call for professors around the world. “The problem with this technology is that the cost of cheating is essentially reduced to zero. It’s easy for students to succumb to temptation,” he said. “I believe the arrival of AI will be like a tsunami for all of us. It will catch everyone off guard. But in my humble opinion, silence is the worst way to solve this problem. “
Who is Roberto Serrano?
Hispanic-American economist Roberto Serrano currently serves as the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University. He lost his sight at the age of 17, but this did not stop him from achieving excellent academic results. He received his PhD from Harvard University and worked at Brown University for more than thirty years. “This certainly affects my life, but it shouldn’t be overly dramatic. We economists understand reality as a group of people dealing with an optimization problem under constraints. I view my disease as one more limitation that I have to deal with and optimize on top of that,” he once said.
