Serrano says he made the exam harder because it was a take-home, but not because he was worried about college students using AI like students in high school and lower have been across the country. The fact that a large number of students had perfect scores on the test prompted him to compare the class’s answers to those that appeared when the bot was asked the same questions.

Now he says that widespread cheating among Brown students indicates a “systemic failure that needs to be addressed from the top.”

Here is where that “systemic problem” starts: naive, clueless professors like Serrano who give students a chance to cheat by assigning take-home tests. For more than a year, the educational and tech journals and the web have been publishing stories about the increase in student use of AI and how it is undermining the already shaky American education/indoctrination system. Obviously people are cheating using AI: lawyers, judges, professors, reporters, doctors, writers. Ethics Alarms has published essays about it. What did Serrano think would happen when he let students take the exam at home?

He didn’t think. It was an irresponsible, incompetent decision.

As if further evidence were needed, Serrano says he included a question from the mid-term on the final. “[On the midterm on that question] the class as a whole had performed beautifully,” he says now. “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….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.”

Brown’s administrators were as asleep at the metaphorical switch as their economics professor. An article in the Brown Daily Herald about Serrano’s botched mid-term quoted Associate Dean of the College for the Academic Code Love Wallace, who wrote in an email, 

“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.”

What an idiotic rationalization for cheating. After that response was widely roasted by Brown’s faculty, Love’s follow-up assessment was “This is a wake-up call.” Hilarious. The wake-up call was in late 2024, for anyone who wanted to wake up.

Now Serrano is telling the world that he has discovered a really big problem! Take it, Bob…

“We cannot have universities where the attitude of the administration is to look the other way. We need to be very clear about putting the necessary guardrails to protect our values. I had to tell them, I’m speaking to all of you, but in particular the cheaters. 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. The worst solution to this is silence.”

And I have to tell Serrano and Brown that they allowed the cheating problem to get to that stage by not doing their jobs. Professors should never give take home exams. Universities should ban them. “The only reason I did it was in reaction to the December 13 tragedy [when there was an active shooter on the campus], the sensitive professors explained. “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.” This is known as training students to be weenies. Bad things happen in life, and an adult has a duty to, as Winston Churchill would say, “Keep buggering on.”

Brown charges just under $100,000 a year for such lazy teaching by professors engulfed by the academic bubble and the attention of administrators like Love Wallace.

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A disturbing side note: The source for this essay was GoLocal Providence. Legal Insurrection, a blog overseen by Prof, William Jacobson of another Ivy League school, Cornell, reported the story in an article that was almost verbatim from the local reports. Or was it written by ChatGPT…The smoking gun? The LI post includes the section for the source piece that reveals that Serrano was disappointed by Brown’s response to the incident, but never reveals what that response was