Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown University: 'Academic integrity is at risk'

[highplainsdem]

https://english.elpais.com/education/2026-06-28/ai-fraud-at-brown-university-academic-integrity-is-at-risk.html

This year, the economist decided that both the midterm and the final exams for his course would be of the take-home, closed-book type (there is a certain tradition of this at Ivy League schools). “It’s a very nice kind of exam, because as you’re giving students practically unlimited time to complete it, it lets you make it harder than normal, to see how far they can go.” In this case, Serrano changed some of the model assumptions they had seen in class, and asked students to demonstrate whether certain statements were true or false under the new assumptions.

The course, which he has been teaching for years, is not an easy one: it typically attracts few students, but very good ones. He has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100. The people who corrected the exams warned him about several irregularities. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” he says.

Serrano did not void the midterm exam, but warned students that the final one, which counted for 50% of the final grade, would be held in-person. He also said that if the grade distribution was not similar to the midterm, only the final exam would be taken into account. The average score dropped to 48 out of 100. Of the 89 students who did the midterm exam, only 59 showed up for the final one. And of the 27 who did not show up, 22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.

“The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming,” says the professor, who has decided to make changes for the coming academic year. First, the weekly exercises will not count towards the final grade, as these could be done with AI. Second, no more take-home exams, no matter how appropriate they would be.

-snip-

This is damning for those students who used AI to cheat, all of whom showed a complete lack of integrity.

And it's damning for university officials, who initially didn't respond at all to his reporting the cheating. This article mentions that Serrano worries that Brown students "always get the benefit of the doubt" because so many of them have wealthy parents who donate to the university.

He doesn't mention - though some quick searching I did confirmed - that Brown's officials have involved the university in a number of AI partnerships and programs. For example: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025/11/brown-begins-to-implement-university-wide-ai-tools . So those officials not wanting to respond to clear evidence of students cheating with AI probably has a lot to do with that entangelement with AI companies. Which makes me wonder how many school officials corrupted by AI companies are trying to suppress reports of cheating with AI.

Btw, the newspaper quoted here, El Pais, is a liberal paper, one of the largest newspapers in Spain, and one that does a lot of reporting on international news as well as Spanish news. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Pa%C3%ADs