When a college professor suspected students were using AI, he made them take an in-person final. Scores fell 50% – for those who took it.

As discussed by Nate Anderson in ArsTechnica (Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%, available here), a blind economics professor at Brown University (Roberto Serrano) decided after a gunman attacked Brown’s campus and killed two people in December 2025 that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final.

Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. Normally, not more than 30 students are enrolled at a time, and on some occasions as few as 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.

Serrano stated: “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.”

But it wasn’t just the numbers. Many of the answers, even when correct, felt slightly off. They had a “very convoluted style,” Serrano said. When he and his grad students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT, they received similar results.

So, a suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it.

He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”

Guess what happened? Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. 22 of those 27 students “had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

Among those who took the test, scores fell 50%—from 96 all the way down to 48.

Given that Serrano had to overcome significant challenges in his life – he went blind from retinal dystrophy at age 17 – and overcame them to attend Harvard and become a college professor, he wants universities as a whole to stand up for human thought.

Sadly, so far, he contends he’s getting a fairly tepid reaction from Brown administrators.

Cheating has existed for as long as schools have existed. But Generative AI is tantamount to cheating on steroids – it’s easy to do and many don’t think it’s even cheating, which is impacting what students are learning. Even in Ivy League schools.

I covered this on PinHawk’s Law Technology Digest yesterday – couldn’t resist covering it here too.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that scores fell 50% when the students couldn’t use AI anymore? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot student receiving a bad grade on a test”.

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