University professor switches to in-person exams amid AI cheating concerns, scores drop 50%

As some may have already suspected, the rise of AI appears to be coming at the expense of learning and critical thinking skills. Suspicious that many students had used AI in a take-home exam for their midterms in March, economics professor Robert Serrano of Brown University decided to make the final exam in-person. He made the following justification:

The course [ECON 1170]… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] 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.

Furthermore, he 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

Upon announcing the decision to make the final exam in-person in an email, eighteen students abruptly dropped the course, while another nine did not attend the final exam. Among these 27 students, 22 had scored a perfect 100 on the midterm. Among those who sat the final exam, the average score plunged from 96 down to 48.

This comes as universities worldwide respond to AI in a variety of ways, with the trend shifting from trying to prevent AI use to figuring out how to use it responsibly. Many universities now distinguish between:

• Acceptable AI use, such as brainstorming, grammar checking, summarizing readings, or generating practice questions.
• Restricted AI use, such as writing assignments that students submit as their own without disclosure.
• Prohibited AI use, particularly during exams or in assignments where instructors explicitly forbid it.

Serrano, for his part, has taken a critical stance on the use of AI, stating:

We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay. That leads to a declining society, to a failed society. We cannot choose to become idiots.