Brown University professor Roberto Serrano allowed students to take their midterm exams at home as the trauma of the Dec. 13 shooting at the university was still lingering. Serrano has been teaching at an Ivy League university for 34 years and this was the first time that he allowed his mathematical economics students to write the exam at home, keeping in mind their mental health, shock and trauma.Of the 86 students who took the March 5 exam, 40 scored full 100 marks. The class average was 96 whereas in previous years, the average was between 65 and 80, although the exam was tougher this time.Serrano said that as he was looking over the papers, he realized that something very unusual had happened. Serrano said, “Some answers included unusual excerpts that matched results obtained after running the questions through ChatGPT,” but he did not rule out midterms and said final exams would be held in person.
‘Why are you at university if you refuse to learn’
Serrano alerted his students after fraud was found in the AI. “If you did that, if you simply pressed a button to ask an AI agent to do it for you, you looked completely irrelevant. So my question to you is, why are you here? If you refuse to learn, you refuse to work hard, if you refuse to put in the effort necessary to develop critical thinking, then why are you at university?” Serrano told his students.“If you’re just pushing a button to make this machine do the work for you, do you think you need a Brown degree for that?”In the in-person final exam, the class average dropped from 100 to 48. Moreover, only 59 appeared for the individual examination and 19 failed. 27 students dropped out of the course when they said finals would be held in person. 22 of them got 100 marks when they took the exam from home.Brian E. Clark, Brown’s vice president for news and strategic campus communications, told Business Insider that Serrano shared the details with the university’s Standing Committee on Academic Code on July 8. The committee “proceeds in accordance with its own procedures.” “Brown takes any allegations of academic honesty with the utmost seriousness,” Clarke wrote.Serrano said this is a warning to professors around the world. He said, “The problem with this technology is that the cost of cheating has basically gone to zero. It is very easy for students to succumb to the temptation.” “I believe the advent of AI is like a tsunami for all of us. It has caught everyone unprepared.” But in my humble opinion, silence is the worst cure for this problem.
Who is Roberto Serrano?
Roberto Serrano, a Spanish-American economist, currently serves as the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University. He became blind at the age of 17, which did not stop him from maintaining his excellent academic record. He received his PhD from Harvard and spent more than three decades at Brown. “Of course it affects my life, but one should not over-dramatize. We economists understand reality as a group of people who respond to optimization problems with restrictions. I look at my illness as just another restriction I have to deal with, and I adapt based on that,” he once said.