“Massive Cheating” in Brown University Class, Alleges Professor - “Systemic Failure That Needs to Be Addressed”

“Massive Cheating” in Brown University Class, Alleges Professor - “Systemic Failure That Needs to Be Addressed”

A Brown University professor is alleging that widespread cheating by students in one of his classes took place this past semester - with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) - and is saying it is a “systemic failure that needs to be addressed from the top.”

Robert Serrano, who has been in the Economics Department at the Ivy League institution for 34 years, says that the grades for a midterm exam, which he allowed to be taken “at-home” - were significantly higher than in previous years.

He says a review by graders found that exam responses mirrored those of ones by ChatGPT - and when he addressed the class and said they could keep the midterm grade they received but had to take the final in-person, that nearly a third of the class dropped out.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Now, he is questioning Brown’s response to the matter.

“I think the incident itself is terrible, but I think in some sense I’m more disappointed by the reaction of the university,” said Serrano.

Exam and AI Cheating in Question

Serrano, who teaches Econ 1170, said that in this class this past spring, “there was a huge difference in the distribution of grades of the midterm exam this time and the midterm exams in previous editions of the course.”

“This is a very challenging course that attracts typically very strong students, and in the past, the average grade for the midterm ranged from 65 to 80,” said Serrano. “The average this time was 96.”

Serrano noted that this past semester, he saw a huge influx of students in his class.

“In past editions of the course, the enrollments were at most 30, as low as 8 one semester,” said Serrano. “This semester it jumped to 86.”

“Perhaps many of them saw that this exam would be take-home,” Serrano continued. “The only reason I did it was in reaction to the December 13 tragedy. I wanted to take the stress away from students. Some of them told me very explicitly they were nervous about going into a classroom environment…I thought I was doing them a favor.”

Moreover, Serrano said he made the exam harder, as it was a take-home.

“Because they’re going to have unlimited time, that’s the point of a take-home exam, right?” said Serrano.

So when the scores were abnormally high, Serrano said he sat down with the graders in the class.

“We asked ChatGPT to solve the exam for us, and some of the answers in ChatGPT, while correct, were really odd,” he said. “It’s like instead of giving me a straight answer, they give you these answers in circles that eventually take you to the right place, and lo and behold, that really bizarre convoluted argument is what appeared [on students’ exams].”

“The technology is useful, and I don’t want to demonize AI as bad technology. It was the potential to be useful when properly used,” he continued. “What we need to understand at the same time is the threat it poses, its misuses.”

Serrano said after the midterm, he told the class he believed “this was an instance of massive cheating.”

“I told them, I’m going to give you a chance to prove me wrong,” he said. “I said if the distribution of grades in the final exam looks roughly similar to the distribution of grades on the midterm, I will count the midterm. But if it doesn’t, at that point, I will declare the midterm null and void and reweight the final exam appropriately.”

The catch, of course, was that the final was going to be “in-person.”

It was at that point, he said, that 27 out of the 86 students dropped the course.

“Most of the 27 had scored 100 on the midterm,” he said. “Of the 59 that stayed and took the final, 19 failed. And of those 19, a lot of them also scored 100 on the midterm.”

He said he even included a question from the midterm on the final.

“[On the midterm on that question] the class as a whole had performed beautifully,” he said. “The average grade [on that question on the final] was 10%. I think the evidence is overwhelming that what we had was a massive incident of cheating.”

Professor Questions University Response

Serrano said that he sent all the communications to students to the provost and dean of the college “just to make clear to them what happened…all I got was complete silence, no reaction.”

After Serrano raised his concerns to students following the midterm, an article in the Brown Daily Herald quoted Associate Dean of the College for the Academic Code Love Wallace. 

“Students who violate the academic code are almost never doing it from a malicious place,” Wallace wrote in an email to The Herald. “Generally speaking, it’s a split-second decision that comes from a place of trying to handle immense external or internal pressure.”

Serrano took issue with that assessment.

“That statement caused a lot of outrage among many of my colleagues in the department,” he said. “You cannot seriously tell me this was a split-second decision - this was an exam with unlimited time, and many of those students cheated all the way to 100.”

“The average grade in the final exam was the lowest ever in the course, 48. So the grade in the class went from 96 in the midterm to 48 in the final,” said Serrano, who said he submitted the case to the committee on the academic code.”

“I prefaced my memo by telling them, look, it’s not clear to me that this is for your committee, which usually deals with violations done by one student, two students. We’re talking about a case that would involve about 50 students,” said Serrano. “Here we’re talking about a case that, in my estimation, would be about 50 students. So what this suggests is there’s a systemic failure that needs to be addressed from the top.”

Serrano said he finally heard from the dean, who he said replied simply, “This is a wake-up call.”

“We cannot have universities where the attitude of the administration is to look the other way,” said Serrano.

“We need to be very clear about putting the necessary guardrails to protect our values,” he said, who then said what he told students.

“I had to tell them, I’m speaking to all of you, but in particular the cheaters,” said Serrano. “If your reaction to this exam was just to press a button to ask the AI agent to do this for you, is you’re showing me you’re totally irrelevant. Therefore, my question to you is, why are you here? Why are you at a university?”

“The point I'm trying to make is that, look, we cannot afford to have a society in which a large number or a significant number of the best minds we have in these different elite schools believe that behaving this way is OK, that cheating is OK,” he said.

“The worst solution to this is silence,” he added.