From 96% to 3 zeros: Professor suspected AI cheating in remote exam. What he did next exposed 57 of 59 students
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Several students dropped from the class and only two of those left scored nearby their midterm score.
A major AI cheating scandal has come to light at Brown University. In a midterm exam which students took from home, the scores were better than average. The professor got suspicious because of the tone of the answers. The final exam exposed the truth.
A Brown University professor was surprised by the excellent scores on a midterm exam that he allowed students to take from home. He suspected that the students had cheated using AI tools, such as ChatGPT. He informed them that the final exam would happen in person. His fears were proven correct when only two out of 86 students scored a grade that was within 10% of their midterm score. Three of them even got zeroes. Roberto Serrano teaches Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory (Econ 1170). He told Higher Ed that historically, the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 per cent.
"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. But this time, his class scored an average of 96%.
There had been a shooting on university grounds in December, which had left the students anxious. So Serrano decided to let them take the midterm exams from their home. This is when the trouble started, he said. When other students heard about it, they rushed to enrol for his paper, with a total of 86 joining him for the semester, way more than the usual 30.
The huge difference in the grades, that touched an average of 96% compared to about 80%, triggered suspicion. Serrano said the answers were “kind of correct, but very off, and with a very convoluted style.” They were technically correct, but the professor suspected they had cheated using AI, as he received similar results when he fed the questions to the tool.
He emailed the students about it and announced that the finals will happen in the classroom, and only if the scores are somewhere near the midterms will they be considered towards the final grade. This caught the students by surprise, after which 18 of them dropped the class and nine of them skipped the final exam. Of the 59 remaining students, three scored zero, and only two students had a score that was within 10% of their midterm score. Only one performed better in the finals.
Serrano has expressed shock at the state of affairs, and is worried about the future, saying that "we cannot have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK."
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