Brown University professor Roberto Serrano allowed the students to take their midterm exam at home, as the shock of the December 13 shooting at the university was still there. Serrano has been teaching at the Ivy League University for 34 years and it was for the first time that he allowed his students of mathematical economics to write their test at home, considering their mental health, the shock and the trauma they underwent.Of the 86 students who took the March 5 exam, 40 scored a perfect 100. The class average was 96 whereas in previous years, the average had ranged between 65 and 80 though this time the exam was harder.Serrano said as he was going through the papers, he realized that something very unusual happened. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” Serrano said but he did not dismiss the midterms and said the final exam would be in-person.
‘Why are you at a university if you refuse to learn’
Serrano gave an earful to his students after he found the AI cheating. “If you did this, if you just press a button to ask an AI agent to do this for you, you’re showing to be completely irrelevant. So my question to you is, why are you here? Why are you at a university if you refuse to learn, you refuse to work hard, if you refuse to put in the necessary effort to develop critical thinking?” Serrano told his students.“If all you’re doing is just pressing a button to have this machine do the work for you, then you think you need a Brown degree for that?”At the in-person final exam, the class average collapsed from 100 to 48. Also, only 59 showed up for the in-person exam and 19 failed. 27 students dropped out of the course when he said the final would be in-person. Among them, 22 had a 100 score when they wrote their exam from home.Brian E Clark, Brown’s VP for news and strategic campus communications, told Business Insider that Serrano shared details with the university’s standing committee on the academic code on July 8. The committee “moves forward according to its procedures.” “Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness,” Clark wrote.Serrano said it was a wake-up call for professors around the world. “The problem with this technology is that the cost of cheating has basically gone down to zero. It’s very easy for students to succumb to the temptation,” he said. “I believe the arrival of AI has been like a tsunami for all of us. It’s caught everybody unprepared. But in my humble opinion, silence is the worst treatment for this problem.”
Who is Roberto Serrano?
A Spanish–American economist, Roberto Serrano, is currently serving as the Harrison S Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University. He turned blind at the age of 17 bit that did not stop him from making his excellent academic record. He earned his PhD at Harvard and has spent more than three decades at Brown. “Of course it affects my life, but one shouldn’t over-dramatize. We economists, understand reality as a set of people responding to optimization problems with restrictions. I view my disease simply as one more restriction that I have to deal with, and I optimize based on that,” he once said.
