Brown’s AI Cheating Scandal

Roberto Serrano has been teaching economics at Brown University for 34 years. The past year was the hardest — both tragic and dismaying. In December, a man walked into a classroom and opened fire, killing and injuring 11 students. Two of the victims were Serrano’s students. In March, he gave the midterm exam in his ECON 1170 course, and the grade distribution strongly suggested that many students had cheated by having AI solve the problems. The final exam, administered in May, erased any doubt.

A massive cheating scandal is bad enough. The anemic response of Brown administrators, Serrano feels, made matters worse. After weeks of frustration at the inaction of the university, Serrano went public in late June in the Spanish newspaper El País. He’s since received hundreds of emails — most encouraging, many in solidarity, one declaring him the “king of idiots” for giving a take-home exam in 2026.

I spoke with Serrano, a renowned game theorist, about that decision, whether colleges are too lenient about enforcing academic integrity, and going blind at the age of 17. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Goldstein: You have for many years taught an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. This year, for the first time, you decided to offer the midterm and final as take-home exams. Here was the grade distribution for the midterm: Among the 86 students in the class, the average score was 96. Forty students — nearly half — earned a perfect 100. What was your initial reaction?

Roberto Serrano: I immediately knew that something was fishy. In previous editions of the course, the average grade in the midterm ranged from 65 to 80. Historically this course has attracted very strong students, and the enrollment was never too high — up to 31 and as low as eight. So my first surprise was that there were so many students registered. I assume that was because they looked at the syllabus and saw that the two exams were going to be take home, which I had never done in the course.

Goldstein: When you and your graders look more closely at the exams, you also detected evidence of AI use.

Serrano: I asked my assistants to run the exam through ChatGPT, and ChatGPT did a decent job solving the exam. However, some of its answers were really odd. For example, there was one question in which the student was asked to prove something, and if you understand the material and know what you’re doing, it’s a direct argument. ChatGPT, for some reason, constructed this very convoluted argument that eventually took it to the right conclusion but in an odd way.

Lo and behold, that convoluted argument appeared in quite a few of the exams. So I told the class — imagine how uncomfortable this was — about my strong suspicion that there had been massive cheating in the midterm. I said, “I’m not going to declare it void for now. I’m going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. If the distribution of grades in the final exam looks roughly similar to the distribution of grades on the midterm, then I’ll count the midterm. If not, I will declare the midterm null and void. Also, the final will be in person.”

Goldstein: You administered the final in mid-May. The average score dropped from 96 to 48. Whereas 86 students took the midterm, only 59 even showed up for the final. Of the students who did not show up, 22 had scored 100 on the midterm.

Serrano: Between the midterm in March and the final in May, there was a consistent flow of students dropping the class — many of them had scored 100 on the midterm. Of the 59 students that took the final, 19 of them failed, so they also failed the course. Quite a few showed up, signed the exam, and turned it in blank. The average grade for this final was by far the lowest in the history of this course.

Goldstein: Whatever scintilla of doubt you had been willing to entertain after the midterm was gone when you saw the results of the final.

Serrano: I had a hypothesis that was tested with the final. The result speaks for itself.

Goldstein: I’ve seen this incident characterized as the largest cheating scandal in Ivy League history.

Serrano: I have heard that, but I don’t have the information to know if that’s the case. I have been teaching at Brown for 34 years, and I have unfortunately had to deal with cheating incidents. I’ve also heard of cheating incidents that have affected my colleagues. None of them are on the scale of this one.

Goldstein: So at least in your experience, this is unprecedented?

Serrano: Nothing comes close. With AI, the cost of cheating has become zero. It’s very easy for students to succumb to the temptation. I presume many of the cheaters were shocked when they learned the results because many of them assumed that not everybody’s going to be doing this. So when it was revealed that 40 of them had scored 100 on the midterm, they may have thought: Oh my God, I’ve been caught.

Goldstein: Let’s talk about the reason you decided for the first time to make the midterm — and initially the final — into a take-home exam. As many Chronicle readers will remember, Brown was the scene of a horrific shooting in December. Two people died; nine more were injured. Two of those injured were students of yours. One of the students who was killed, Ella Cook, had sought you out a few days prior to the shooting to see if you would be her adviser.

Serrano: The shooting happened on a Saturday, and my wife and I started to see a lot of police cars and ambulances heading towards the East Side, the part of Providence where Brown is located. Immediately we started to get messages about an active shooter on campus. Later I found out that the room where the shooting took place was the scene of a review session for the final exam of the “Principles of Economics” course, which is taught by a colleague whose office is right by mine. I kept thinking of her. What really shook me to the core was the news on Monday when the names of the two mortal victims were released. I saw Ella Cook. I had had a wonderful conversation with her in my office. I was so impressed with her maturity, with her energy. That’s the only conversation I had with her.

Goldstein: I appreciate you sharing all of that. In the wake of the shooting, there is a general sense of the grief and disorientation felt by you and your students. Some of them are afraid to physically come to class. So you figure a take-home exam would be less stressful and more appropriate to the circumstances?

Serrano: That’s exactly right. Some of the students were still terrified of classroom settings.

Goldstein: You had notified the dean of your decision to switch the take-home final to an in-person one based on the alarming midterm grades. He greenlit that move. So the dean knows about your suspicions. Who else did you tell and how did they react?

Serrano: When I informed the class what had happened with the midterm, I also put it in writing, and I sent that to the dean and the provost to keep them informed. I got no reaction whatsoever. After the final-exam results were in, I sent another message to the class making it official that I was declaring the midterm null and void. I also submitted the case to the Committee on the Academic Code. I copied the provost and the dean.

I got no reaction from the provost — I continue to be completely ignored. The dean wrote back to say this is a wake-up call. He also said that I would need to submit for each individual student a separate memo. I said I’m not going to do that because it’s a huge amount of work. That is absolutely insane. In the preface of my memo to the Committee on the Academic Code, I said that I’m sending the case to them but they’re accustomed to dealing with individual cases or cases involving two or three students. I estimate about 50 students cheated in my class. So we need decisions from the top about how to deal with this. The committee never acknowledged that it received my case.

Goldstein: It’s two months later now. Have you heard anything?

Serrano: No. But I did hear yesterday from my department chair after the El País article was published. They want the names of the students involved. I told him what I told the dean: That’s a crazy amount of work. And frankly, it sounds to me like a stalling tactic.

But what I said I can do is send a spreadsheet with the names of each student and their Brown ID, and two more columns, one with the midterm exam and one with the final exam. It speaks for itself. So it seems like something is going to happen. But I think it’s very odd the committee never acknowledged receipt of my submission. I am still very frustrated, because this is such an important fight and the faculty should not be left alone to fight it. We need the support of university administrations. When an incident of this magnitude happens, we cannot afford to remain silent, even if it’s unclear what to do. Yes, this is a new horizon here. Fine. Let’s have a conversation about the right uses of AI, how it should and should not be used as part of our learning mission. But when academic integrity is violated, we must all come out and defend it strongly.

Goldstein: I’m hearing two main things driving your frustration. One is that the procedures in place to handle academic misconduct are inadequate to the world of AI we now inhabit, and the university has been too sluggish to acknowledge and rectify that. Second, which is related, is that Brown administrators have not treated the incident with the gravity you feel it deserves.

Serrano: I would think the administration would have done at least two things. One, to offer moral support to the instructor to let me know that I’m not alone here. Second, to send a message to the entire class that made clear that they’re going to start an investigation. If you do nothing, which is what happened, then we are sending the wrong message to students. As a game theorist, I’m interested in changing the behavior of people, in improving the behavior of people. You’re not going to improve behavior unless you put in place the right incentives. When somebody cheats, that should have consequences. [Asked for comment, a Brown spokesman said the university “treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness” and that “multiple academic leaders” have been in touch with Serrano. To date, the spokesman says, Serrano “has not provided the necessary details to the Standing Committee on the Academic Code to pursue this path toward resolution.”]

Goldstein: As a game theorist, what do you think is driving the seemingly meek response of campus leaders?

Serrano: There’s a complex answer to that, and it’s not just about Brown. There’s a lot of money involved with donors and powerful families, and many of those families have students attending the university. Some might think, Let’s not talk about this because it’s going to be bad for the Brown name. Better to turn the page.

That’s a very naïve and incorrect analysis. It’s important to come out in strong defense of academic integrity. We cannot afford to have a society where a significant fraction of our brightest young minds are of the opinion that it’s perfectly OK to cheat. I told the class after the midterm that if all you did in this exam is press a button so that an AI agent solved it for you, why are you here? Why are you a student at a university if you refuse to learn, refuse to do the hard work that is necessary? I don’t know if you saw, but there was an op-ed in The New York Times by a Stanford graduate.

Goldstein: Theo Baker.

Serrano: Right. He described a generalized culture of cheating. Students aren’t interested in learning so much as meeting powerful people and obtaining that Stanford label. They are essentially choosing to become idiots. Also, the value of that label will go down if these universities produce mediocre graduates that refuse to work. The market will notice and react.

Look, I’m an optimist in many ways. Perhaps related to my blindness, I think it’s important to always be optimistic. If you look at previous technological revolutions, they always create in the short run a period of chaos. Society needs time to adjust. The problem with AI is that it has come so quickly and so strongly, like a tsunami. It caught us unprepared. Now we need to get better prepared.

Goldstein: You mentioned the possible financial incentives at play among administrators, and the general disorientation as we all adjust to AI and its evolving capabilities. I want to suggest one more possible culprit, a prevalent mindset on campuses. Here’s a quote that Love Wallace, who is the associate dean of the college for the academic code — the person who chairs the committee you submitted your cheating case to — gave to the Brown Daily Herald: “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: That statement from Love Wallace caused a huge amount of anger in my department, so much so that colleagues put pressure on the chair to raise a complaint to the dean and ask for a retraction or some other action. Her words convey absolutely the wrong message to students. In terms of my exam, you cannot tell me the cheating was a split-second decision. This was an exam with unlimited time, and this was an exam in which many of the cheaters cheated all the way to get a grade of 100. That is not a split-second decision. It is a deliberate attempt to cheat by many, many, many students. So that statement from Ms. Wallace doesn’t hold water.

Goldstein: You went blind at the age of 17 as you were transitioning from high school to college. Your father played an important role in helping you adapt. Every afternoon after class your father would help to decipher your hard-to-read notes because you were scribbling with failing eyesight, and then you translated those notes into Braille, which you had just started learning. Incidentally, years later, the university you attended in Madrid awarded your father an honorary degree in recognition of his contribution to your formation as an academic. You attend graduate school at Harvard, but your father does not go with you. You tape lectures so you can listen to them later. You take notes in Braille. Friends organized to record themselves reading academic papers so that you could listen and learn.

Serrano: It was amazing. When we all arrived, I don’t think my classmates knew initially that there was a blind student in the class. They organized volunteers, and every week two of them would record the relevant paper for the week.

Goldstein: Here’s some armchair psychologizing: Your education was an exercise in extraordinary perseverance. It was hard for you in ways that few of us can fully appreciate. This would quite naturally cement in your mind an ironclad connection between effort and learning — a staunch belief that the latter depends entirely on the former. Few, if any, of your students face hurdles akin to the ones you’ve overcome. Yet an astonishing number of them apparently opted to take a shortcut. I imagine that’s particularly galling to you.

Serrano: Yes, perhaps. A culture of effort and hard work should be inherent to learning. I worry many of our students now have the wrong idea, believing that the answer to any question can be obtained with a couple of clicks of the mouse. I tell them that years from now, their grades won’t matter. What will matter is how much they learned and how much stayed in their brain.

As for me, I try to de-dramatize my blindness. There are people in the world with problems much more serious than mine. As an economist, I tend to understand the world as people solving constrained-optimization problems. My blindness is just one more constraint.