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A tenured professor at Brown University says he suspects at least half of his students are cheating their way through an economics course he teaches by using AI to produce answers, and that he suspects it is a widespread problem at the prestigious academic institution.
In an essay published in the Free Press, Roberto Serrano, a professor who has taught at the Ivy League school for 34 years, said he believed students were cheating after unusually high results on a take-home exam.
During this summer semester, he allowed his class to take their midterm at home in closed-book format after some expressed anxiety about being on campus following a shooting at Brown on Dec. 13 that took place during an exam review session.
Upon receiving the results through the online portal where the exams were administered, Serrano found them “immediately suspicious.”
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“The average grade was 96, with 40 students obtaining a perfect score,” he wrote.
That, “compared to a midterm average ranging between 65 and 80 in previous years,” was odd, he surmised, noting that class enrolment also jumped when he decided to administer online tests.
Serrano said he detected irregularities in many exams, including chunks of text that “matched the answers I received when I provided the exam questions to ChatGPT.”
To test his suspicions, Serrano told the class he believed there was widespread cheating on the midterm but opted not to nullify the results. If the grade distribution for the final looked roughly the same as the midterm, he would count the midterm; otherwise, he would void the midterm and reweigh the final. He also informed the class that the final would be in-person and closed-book.
Between both exams, the Brown Daily Herald, the university newspaper, published a story reporting that patterns of cheating and dubious exam scores were commonplace in economics classes at Brown.
Serrano also notes in his essay that his colleagues had reported that many students often received perfect scores on take-home assignments but performed far less well in person.
Students attending Brown University walk through the main campus March 19, 2025 in Providence, Rhode Island.
Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
The Herald article quotes students as saying that pressure to perform and busy lives were factors in cheating. The school’s associate dean of the College for the Academic Code appeared to concur, arguing, “Students who violate the academic code are almost never doing it from a malicious place. Generally speaking, it’s a split-second decision that comes from a place of trying to handle immense external or internal pressure.”
Serrano refutes the dean’s and the students’ claims, arguing that competitive environments are not an excuse for cheating, and notes that he gave his students ample time — 11 hours — to complete their exams, meaning there were no circumstances in which AI tools could be legitimately used to offset a time crunch, he said, concluding that cheating was a deliberate choice.
Final exam results and turnout proved his hypothesis, he wrote.
“Of the 86 students who took the midterm, only 59 took the final, and of the 27 students who chose to drop the course, 22 had scored 100 on the midterm.”
The problem persists at universities in Canada, too. In May, a professor at Western University alleged that most students in his health care law class used AI to cheat on their final exam, and accused the school in an interview with the London Free Press of being “willfully blind” to their actions.
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
