Brown University AI Cheating Scandal Widens as Professor Says School Was Slow to Act

Brown University AI Cheating Scandal Widens as Professor Says School Was Slow to Act

Brown University's economics department is facing continued scrutiny after professor Roberto Serrano went public with evidence that dozens of students used AI to cheat on a take-home midterm exam this year. Serrano says the class's average score of 96% — far above the historical 65–80% range — first raised his suspicions, which deepened after a teaching assistant fed the same questions into ChatGPT and got matching, unusually convoluted answers.

After switching the final exam to an in-person format, Serrano found average scores dropped sharply to 48.6%, and noted that 22 of the 27 students who dropped the course rather than sit the in-person final had scored perfectly on the AI-suspected midterm. He says Brown only launched a formal investigation after his account went viral via Spanish outlet El País and Inside Higher Ed — not when he first raised it internally.

The case has become a reference point in a broader higher-education reckoning with generative AI, as more universities publicly grapple with how to preserve academic integrity without abandoning take-home and remote assessment formats altogether.