Professor Roberto Serrano at Brown University discovered that at least 50 students used artificial intelligence to cheat on his ECON 1170 midterm exam in March. The advanced mathematical economics course saw an average score of 96 out of 100, with 40 students achieving perfect marks. Serrano found suspicious passages that matched results from ChatGPT queries. When he reported the fraud to university officials, President Christina Paxson remained silent while Dean Samir Srouji initially offered no comment.

The professor changed his approach for the final exam, switching to an in-person format. Average scores plummeted to 48 out of 100, and 22 of the 27 students who skipped the final had previously scored perfect 100s. Serrano argues the university's response—calling the incident merely a "wake-up call"—fails to address the severity. He believes Brown protects wealthy students whose families make significant donations, giving them undue benefit of the doubt in academic misconduct cases.

The cheating scandal compounds a traumatic year for Brown. A shooting in December killed two people and injured nine others during an economics review session. Serrano had initially offered take-home exams to ease student anxiety after the incident. One victim, Ella Cook, had visited his office just days before her death to discuss enrolling in his Intermediate Microeconomics course.

Serrano plans major changes for next year: eliminating take-home exams entirely and removing weekly exercises from final grades. He argues higher education faces an existential threat from AI-enabled fraud and calls for honest public discussion about the problem's scope rather than institutional silence.