From the Brown Daily Herald: Economics Professor Roberto Serrano normally holds in-person exams for his ECON 1170: “Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory” class, but this semester he decided to assign a take-home, closed-book exam for the first midterm to alleviate pressure for students after the Dec. 13 shooting. But after the class’s grade distributions indicated widespread cheating, Serrano has decided to return to in-person exams for all of his courses. The median for the exam was 98%, with 40 out of 86 students scoring 100%. Compared to previous data, the distribution for his first ECON 1170 midterm was “absolutely ridiculous,” especially since he had designed a more challenging exam for the take-home format, Serrano said in an interview with The Herald. “Historically, the average grade in the midterm exams ranged from 65 to 85,” Serrano said. After investigating the exam results, Serrano said he found signs of AI use and collaboration amongst students...
Pakzad-Hurson also suspects student AI use on homework assignments. “The biggest shift is just that students are seemingly a lot better at homework now,” Pakzad-Hurson said. He has noticed “perfect performance” on homeworks and “poor performance” on tests. Pakzad-Hurson lowered the weight of homeworks on students’ overall grades to reduce the incentive to submit AI work.
Economics Professor Rajiv Vohra noted that AI does not appear to be a problem with in-person exams, but may be an issue with homeworks or take-home exams. Teaching Professor of Economics Sylvia Kuo has also noticed potential AI usage on her homework assignments, even though they are graded based on effort. She said she has seen “weird answers” that still arrive at a solution, but use terminology that is inconsistent “with what was taught.”
In the last year, Kuo has also seen a decrease in exam scores, despite the fact that the content of exams has been “roughly” the same since she started teaching the course more than a decade ago. She said this suggests students are not using their “own brain” to do the “learning in order to perform well on exams.” ...
Full story at https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2026/04/after-ai-cheating-concerns-economics-professors-see-in-person-exams-as-a-path-forward.
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