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Award winning economist and Brown University professor Roberto Serrano says he has detected what appears to be the largest AI cheating scandal in Ivy League history.
As Spanish newspaper El País reports, Serrano noticed red flags as soon as he looked at the scores of a March midterm exam for one of the classes he teaches, an advanced undergrad course in mathematical economics.
The take-home and closed-book exam — an “Honor Code” type of test Ivy League schools are known for — resulted in 40 out of 86 students scoring a perfect 100. The average score was an equally questionable 96 out of 100.
In other words, it’s not a stretch to assume students gave in to the temptation to ask an AI chatbot for answers, particularly in the confines of their own homes without a teaching assistant looking over their shoulder. In Serrano’s testing, that appeared to be the case.
“Some answers contained unusual passages that coincided with results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” Serrano told El País.
Perhaps most tellingly, the average score of an in-person final, which accounted for half of the final grade of the class, was an abysmal 48 out of 100. Of the 27 students who didn’t even bother to show up for the test, 22 had scored a 100 during the midterm exam, providing plenty of credence to Serrano’s theory.
“The empirical evidence of fraud is overwhelming,” he told the paper.
The incident highlights just how pervasive the use of AI has become in the classroom. Even students at highly reputable Ivy League schools are resorting to the tools to cheaply score high grades — even when doing so directly contradicts an honor code they all swore to uphold.
Compounding the concerning development, literacy and numeracy rates have taken a major hit over the last couple of years. College professors warn that we’re hitting a crisis point as incoming students barely have a middle-school level understanding of math and other subjects.
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