According to an article by the American publication 'Inside Higher Education' dated July 8th, Professor of Economics at Brown University, Seralino, recently revealed that he discovered that dozens of students were using AI to cheat on midterm exams during his course on Welfare Economics.
In December last year, a shooting incident occurred on Brown University’s campus, resulting in 2 deaths and 9 injuries. Many students have developed psychological trauma from the online classes. Serano said that allowing students to take exams at home is a reasonable choice. However, by the end of the semester, Serano regretted this decision.
Serrano said that dozens of students in the class were suspected of cheating with the help of AI, achieving full marks or near-full marks during their mid-term exams. As a result, Serrano changed the final exams to offline closed-book exams. This led to several students dropping out of the class, and even more students failing the exams.
Normally, at most only 30 people take this course. This spring, the number of students has reached 86. Serano believes that the sharp increase in numbers is because the school promised that students could submit their assignments from home during midterms.
After the mid-term grades were released, the average score of the whole class was as high as 96 points. He noticed something was wrong and compared the test questions with ChatGPT’s results. The answers generated by AI matched those of the students highly. These answers seemed generally correct, but there were obvious logical flaws, and their expression was difficult to understand. "It’s obvious that these aren’t human-written answers."
After the mid-term exams, Serano issued a notice to the entire class, openly suspecting that a large number of students were using AI to cheat. He also decided to convert the final exams into offline closed-book examinations.
He wrote in the notice: "I will not cancel the mid-term grades for now. I am willing to give everyone the opportunity to prove that my prediction is wrong. If the distribution of final grades is roughly similar to that of the mid-term grades, then the mid-term scores will be included in the total grade. However, I predict the opposite to be true. In that case, I will cancel the mid-term grades and significantly increase the weight of the final assessment."
After this message was sent out, the students fell into silence. Subsequently, 18 students chose to drop classes, and 9 students who remained on the class selection list failed to attend the final exams.
The final grades confirmed Serano’s judgment: three students got zero on their test papers, and the class average was only 48.6 points, setting the lowest record for this course. Only a very small number of students had scores that were the same both at the end of the term and during the mid-term.
A comparison chart of the scores of 59 students taking the final exam. The orange colors represent their scores at the midterm, and the gray colors represent their scores at the final. *Inside Higher Education*
Serrano then posted another message to inform students that the midterm grades were officially invalidated, and the weight of final exams in the overall grade was increased to 80%. He lowered the passing score for final exams from 50 points to 40 points. As a result, a total of 19 students failed this course.
After the incident, Serano criticized the school's handling of the situation as 'too lenient'. He said: 'We cannot tolerate a significant portion of the best young people believing that cheating is acceptable. This will lead to social decline and societal collapse... We cannot choose to be fools.'
