Prof. Robert Serrano, who has been teaching in Brown University’s Economics Department for 34 years, is sounding off in horror about the scourge of artificial intelligence being used by students to cheat. He apparently missed the last two years.
Serrano had allowed the class in Econ 1170, an advanced course he has been teaching for many years, to take the mid-term exam at home. He was shocked—shocked!—that a large number of his students apparently cheated and used ChatGPT to do it. The grades for a midterm exam were not only significantly higher than in previous years, but a review of the answers submitted found that many responses were identical to those the bot came up with. Not only that, but when Serrano told the class that they could keep the midterm grade they received but that the final would be taken in an exam room with a monitor, nearly a third of the class , 27 out of 86, dropped out. Coincidentally, most the drop-outs had scored 100 on the mid-term.
This was sufficient evidence for the professor to conclude that his students had cheated on the test. No shit, Sherlock.
“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,” says Serrano. “The average this time was 96.” He also saw a huge increase in enrollments in his class this year. “In past editions of the course, the enrollments were at most 30, as low as 8 one semester,” he says. “This semester it jumped to 86. Perhaps many of them saw that this exam would be take-home.”
Ya think?
Ethics Alarms 
Take home exams, with AI present is the academic equivalent to the political mail-in ballots. Both are arenas for cheating, and cheaters will cheat!
Your point leads me to my Machiavellian point I have been making for a while. Republicans will have a very hard time winning the “right” way when their opponents are not playing by the rules. The way this could end very fast is for the republicans to out cheat the democrats on some key races. But don’t do it subtle. Use one of two methods:
This proposal amounts to a race to the ethical bottom. What I hear is that when the Democrats cheat the Republicans should respond by cheating in a similar way; please correct me if I am wrong. My take is that cheating is wrong, and that two wrongs do not make a right.
Then there are practical considerations. Such as that Democrats are good at certain practices (such as cheating during elections, or political street fighting (Antifa), supported by an NGO infrastructure (Soros) and institutions such as the courts. Democrats are better at lawfare than Republicans, judging from the lack of success of the Bondi DOJ. The Democrats have Antifa, and they act with nigh legal immunity. How did the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers do during J6 and the “Unite the Right” protests in Charlottesville in 2017?
The moral of the story is that the Right should not ape the methods of the Left, for both ethical and practical reasons; the Right will get their ass handed back to them in the courts and in Congress if they do so. That is one lesson the Right should have learned from the J6 / 2020 elections debacle.
I would be skeptical of the utility of an advanced economics course taught by someone who evidently doesn’t understand economics well enough to apply it in his own professional work. The professor provides an object lesson in what happens when you assume that human behavior will conform to the model. That makes me question how useful the course material is and what the professor could possibly add to it through teaching.
Twenty years ago, I took my son to a week-long new student summer orientation at a large public university. The students would be staying in a dorm. As part of the program, everyone had to sign a student conduct contract. As it turned out, I arrived after the distribution and signing of contracts, since I had trouble finding a parking place, but I read the contract during the program. When I called out several clauses in the contract that would prevent my son and I from signing it, my concerns were dismissed. “Oh, we gave you (all) the wrong contract. That’s for high-school sports camps. Those clauses don’t apply to your student, but you can sign it anyway.” Oh, really? What an introduction to university ethics!
I think this is more a symptom of the current failure of the education system to match up class content to relevant real life applicable knowledge. All they need this class for is a diploma, probably ten kids in the entire US will find the actual class content relevant for anything other than a checkbox to get a degree. This is what happens when your goal is to pass tests for grades instead of learn content.
An economy professor and one of his students have fallen into a deep pit from which their is no escape with help from the outside. The student asks the professor how to get out. The professor starts with “Assume a ladder…..”
This is an interesting story to me.
When I was working for a major company in the early 1980s, they thought some of us should have bachelor’s degrees (because our job descriptions called for a degree). So they made arrangements with Wayland Baptist to have us attend some of Wayland’s remote learning classes.
Back then, remote learning meant that the class was taught in another town than where the university was located, but still taught in person by their professors. It was something Wayland specialized in with a number of military bases.
We went for three weekends of all day classes, and at the end there was a take home test in order to pass the course. Of course in 1980, if you wanted to research something, you headed to the university library (or whatever equivalent existed in your town). I want to tell you that those take home tests were wicked hard. You had only your own ingenuity and knowledge of the subject.
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In a similar vein, in my current job, I needed to take tests a few years ago to level up my job category — which meant more opportunities and higher pay.
The tests for this were actually open book, but you had to take them in a company office on their computer system. I recall them as being challenging in two different ways. One was to ask about specific details — I don’t know that knowing exactly what is the section and subsection of the Internal Revenue Code you use to account for, say, wash sales, is particularly relevant, but you could look it up.
More substantive would be the questions that had you actually apply the tax laws to a situation, which tested whether you had actually learned how to write the tax return. You could look this up too, to some extent, but then you had to actually apply the law to the situation. Much more relevant to the job, in my opinion.
But either way, at that time there was no ChatGPT available (although there was still Google). To this day, I still dislike the idea of turning to AI to look up a tax question. Guess I’m becoming a dinosaur……
But also yes, there were (and are) ways to game the system which I know people have used. On the gripping hand, it makes people like me more valuable as we tend to actually know how to write returns as opposed to just doing data entry…..
The kind of tests you describe are the kind of take-home exams that are meaningful. They are meant for the student to utilize their knowledge and their research skills to develop appropriate solutions. Some of the hardest exams I had in school were take home or open notebook ones. There is still an expectation that the student is going to be honest and not cheat, but in general it is harder to do so because the answers are based on the individual’s knowledge, not an easy response.
It is a cliche to say that when you cheat, you only cheat yourself, because you don’t actually learn what you presumably want to learn. Eventually, if this information becomes important to you in the rest of your life or career, you won’t know it and end up knowing that you aren’t as “smart” as you’d like to believe. Perhaps students don’t understand that anymore.
The cheaters also cheat the non-cheaters, if an exam is graded on a curve.
My first semester in college, my finals schedule was such that my English exam was three or four days after all my other exams were done. I went to my professor and asked him whether he wouldn’t let me take the exam early so I could have three or four more days over the Christmas break in my home far away. Much to my surprise, he turned me down very firmly, no questions asked. I was such an altar boy and so naive that it never occurred to me that he was concerned I’d tell other guys what was on the test. He never said anything by way of explanation, and it wasn’t until years later I figured it out.
Unlike the other commenters, I do not think of take home exams as “easy to cheat”. The very phrase “take home exam” still fills me with anxiety. Professors in my experience used those to humble difficult classes. Once one of my professors explained how open note, book, etc exams were meant to be. The idea was that there were so many questions and calculations required that the time allotted would only allow someone who knew where to find the information in the notes/text to achieve their goal. They said take home exams were no different.
One of my favorite professors was known for his brutal exams. If you were allotted one hour for the exam, to complete it would take the average student between 2 and 3 hours. His two hour exams took closer to 6-8 hours for the average student. You either answered one or two questions completely correctly, or you set up how to get the solution to every problem with notes on the next steps that you hoped to get to. He preferred this type of answer. Partial credit was the name of the game. So one exam, in Advanced Reaction Kinetics, Catalysis, and Reactor Design, responding to the complaints of the students, he gave us a take home exam. The rules were simple. They were open book, open note, open neighbor, open library, open computer program, open group, but not open professor. After that beast, we begged him to PLEASE return to the old style of exams. It was at least 40 hours of brutal hell, with a normal return requiring something a lot tougher than the average stapler to turn the tome of handwritten calculations in. This exam required advanced knowledge of equations of state, with trick questions for those who decided to use the approved proprietary computer programs designed for these calculations. If you thought you’d found a comparatively easy way to answer the question, it was because you were doing it wrong. The old fashioned pencil and paper method was superior on the test. Unlike other exams, partial credit was not an option for an unfinished problem, and he refused to curve. I think that professor could have made a ChatGPT proof take home exam. He probably has, because he always prided himself in being aware of technology and knowing how to beat it. He even gave lectures on why technology made for bad engineers if they weren’t on top of the limitations and routinely gave assignments in class to prove his point.
I don’t think I ever had a prof like that, but I did have “take-home” exams in one grad school advanced economics class (way before anything more than a basic Texas Instruments calculator was available to the few who could afford them at that point). Obviously we could use the textbooks and whatever sources we could find, but they still took hours to do. I don’t remember enough specifics to know if AI could have defeated them, but it seems quite possible that a good one today might be able to analyze the problem, process the information, and give an acceptable answer.
Take home exams were hard when all you had was the library and course material. When you have Google, YouTube, and AI, I could see them being fairly easy if you are an experienced cheater. Higher ed has to catch up, or I will be fully in favor of revoking accreditation.
Similar to the age old fight between armor and armaments, the battle between those trying to thwart cheating and those who can and will cheat, the thwarters are often behind playing defense.
We have to try to prevent students from using technology unethically at the same time we have to use technology to teach the content. Two issues we’ve been dealing with the last couple of years are:
Anyone what has been teaching for anytime at all and doesn’t see the proliferation of technology used for cheating is either criminally unaware or willfully blind.
One method I use to reduce cheating relies on age and curmudgeonness; I make students print out papers and hand write responses in their lab assignments. I can quickly read their work and provide feedback while working on their writing skills.
Higher ed is a topsy turvy place where the outstandingly mediocre get degrees in “education,’ take over institutions, and put in absurd policies that will continue the decline of higher ed. This doesn’t even include the progressive takeover of higher ed.
You would think an economics professor would have a little more connection to the real world, especially with that whole incentives idea and the widespread cheating going on. The fact students are seeking out “take home exam” professors is disheartening but not surprising.
I don’t know how higher ed will continue to function if we get this trifecta of education majors, political activists, and the hopelessly naive all working together like this. In the area I work, everyone puts pronouns in their e-mail signature and buries their hand in the sand.
We were told that you have to outright “prove” the student cheated, and they should be presumed innocent otherwise. I am in favor of a fair hearing and not jumping to conclusions, but when you get well structured papers with minimal to no grammar issues coming in introductory classes during a students first semester, that’s a sign something is amiss.
We probably need to go back to the old format of structured exams that are wroth 80% of the grade, and the structured exams are administrated in class or in a testing center. I suspect higher ed would have a lot of drop outs, which means less money.
With less students passing, less money comes in, and less money means budget cuts. Getting rid of the bloated admin side would be great, but these education majors and political activists likely won’t do that, so we continue onward in this system destined to become even worse.