Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat

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July 08, 2026

Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat

Brown University leaders’ response to the alleged cheating incident has been “meek,” the professor said.

By

Emma Whitford

In a message to students after the midterm, Serrano told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and that he was changing the final exam to be conducted in person.

Roberto Serrano | Scott Eisen/Getty Images

For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.

But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.

His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.

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“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,” Serrano said.

He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.

In a message to students after the midterm that he shared with Inside Higher Ed, he told them he suspected many of them of using AI to cheat and, with the blessing of his dean, changed the final exam to an in-person test.

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“I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong,” he wrote. “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.”

Serrano heard crickets from his students, but 18 of them subsequently dropped the class. Nine students remained enrolled but did not take the final exam. And Serrano said the results proved him right; three students earned a zero, and the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, he said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent. Only a few students scored similarly to how they did on the midterm.

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In a follow-up message to students, Serrano announced the midterm was void and the final exam would be worth 80 percent of the students’ final grade. Any student that scored a 40 percent or higher on the final earned a passing grade—previously, he set the passing line at 50 percent or higher. In total, 19 students failed the class.

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In May, Serrano submitted the data shown above to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.

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