You don’t say. This is a story about a professor who discovered his students will use AI to cheat.
Serrano decided that his spring 2026 section of the quite difficult ECON 1170 would allow take-home exams for both the midterm and the final. Suddenly, the course received an influx of students. El País has the story:
The course… typically attracts few students, but very good ones. [Serrano] has never had more than 30 students enrolled at a time, and on some occasions he had only eight. This semester, probably because of the new evaluation system, 86 students signed up for the class. The results of the midterm exam, which was administered on March 5, were extraordinary, with an average score of 96 out of 100. Forty students scored a perfect 100.
This was indeed extraordinary, because as Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because… take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time.”
I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system. This professor decided to test his students.
A suspicious Serrano decided that he would make the final exam in-person; he would see if students did similarly well on it. He emailed his class, telling them, “I am not declaring [the midterm] void for now. I am going to give the class a chance to prove me wrong. That is, if the distribution of the final exam is roughly similar to the distribution of the midterm, I will count the midterm. Otherwise, which is of course what I expect to happen, I will declare the midterm void and reweigh the final accordingly.”
Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”
Among those who took the test, the average score plunged—from 96 all the way down to 48.
He should have known that the scores on the final were not going to come close to the scores on the midterm. I knew in my classes that grades were going to drop when I stopped offering online exams. I wouldn’t have offered a phony deal like that to my students.
My classes were a bit different, though. It sounds like Serrano’s econ exams consisted of a lot of essay questions which could be flooded with AI slop; my exams are much more quantitative, with questions that are answered by numbers, which you’d think would be even more susceptible to AI cheating, but where I catch students who fail to grasp the process to solve the problem. You gotta know how to ask the AI how to solve the problem to get a good answer!
But still, exam scores were notably elevated during the pandemic, so once I could rely on instruction to return to normal, I made all exams to be in-class. However, I still offer weekly online quizzes. Quiz scores are significantly elevated, but constitute less than 10% of the final grade, and I don’t have a problem with that — I tell the students to cheat freely, to collaborate with their fellow students and work through the quizzes together. That’s been a benefit, because it forces students to think through the problems in a kind of practice exercise, and if they are working together they are teaching each other.
I’ve got one more year of teaching ahead of me. I plan on sticking to this same procedure in the next two semesters.
And, on top of facilitating cheating, destroying neighborhoods, muskrat’s AI creating porn, AI is now being used to steal people’s lives.
‘The Creepiest Possible Path’: Meta Letting Facebook, Instagram Use Your Personal Posts for AI Image Generation
“People should not wake up to discover their face has become raw material for someone else’s AI experiment. This is another invasion of consumers’ privacy.” Brad Reed Jul 08, 2026
https://www.commondreams.org/news/meta-muse-image-privacy
As for quantitative tests…. My late wife’s math was pretty weak. As a student (she majored in Linguistics), she took a Physics course as a breath requirement. Another student living in the same facility was in the same section of the course. So the two of them would get together to do the problem sets. The other student knew how to use a slide rule (this being the early 1960s), so my wife would set up the problems and the other student would then do the calculations to get the numerical answer.
Came the time of the final exam. My wife reasoned that, this being a Physics course rather than a math course, she went through and set up all equations and then went back to laboriously solve as many as she could in the available time. She got a quite decent grade. The other student did much worse as she struggled to set up the problems so she could solve them.
I used to work at a physics department, and during the pandemic, one of the professors spearheaded a study on Chegg and student cheating. (Basically, if a problem existed, students would be able to find a solution online. Chegg also offered live question-answering services, so he recommended that if we did online exams, they should be all at once and time-restricted such that anything short of ‘have your friend in the room’ was unlikely to get the exam finished in time.)
But I ended up doing the same solution as you: most of the course grade was in-person exams or problem-solving sessions, and points for homework or reading quizzes were minimal. (I already used online homework where students had multiple tries to get the correct answer, so I was scaling assuming students would do better on them than the exams even without cheating — the points were largely because I wanted students to do them.)
Yeah, at the college level, the math part of a quantitative problem is usually fairly trivial. The hard parts are a) analyzing and interpreting the question, b) identifying the relevant parts of the problem, and c) figuring out a method for solving it. LLMs struggle with that (unless it’s a canned problem that has already been solved somewhere on the internet.) Come to think of it, they also tend to fail at the simple math.
Hey, my wife was a psychologist, but her masters project was in psychological linguistics.
I’m curious what those who so blatently cheat on exams expect to do when (and if) they are hired into a professional job. Grades may get you a job but performing well is what keeps you there. It’s that old cartoon of two professor types in front of a chalkboard filled with equations except in the middle where “a miracle occurs” is written. One man is saying to the other “I think you shoud be more specific here.” Change “miracle” to “ChatGPT” and, well, there you are.
And yet many students got perfect scores in a tertiary economics test without being particularly personally competent.
(Not bad for LLMs that allegedly not good at that sort of thing, is it? Strange, even)
I imagine most cheaters are just thinking in the short term to deal with the immediate “danger.” Though I can certainly suspect there are a lot of white men cheaters who expect privilege to carry them through despite their lack of understanding.
Turns out those students performed rather well with that tool at hand.
Why would they not continue to perform well once employed?
Utterly misapprehends the very joke.
ChatGPT is quite real, and explanatory, not at all like a miracle.
(Be aware that is a brand name, not a generic term; there are many more LLMs around)
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds.”
John Maynard Keynes
phillipbrown, sure. He was intimating that though it does not seem to require stuff, but the bloke must be exceptional to master it. A rare combo of wondrousness.
(Oddly, he was one himself, but O so modest with it!)
Your quote-mining kinda excluded the message itself, much as a creationist quoting Darwin and the eye bit.
(https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/keynes-on-what-is-required-to-make-a-great-economist.html)
Recent in-person test cheating has been reported to be “Meta-glasses, transmitting video to remote accomplice that sends back answers via bone-induction audio”.
In some ways, one has to applaud the technological innovation.
Then, seal the students in a Faraday cage.
I teach on professional courses largely assessed by essays and similar. We have altered some of the specifics to be things LLMs are less good at, and talk to students about the use of LLMs. Although you could potentially get a half decent grade by feeding prompts to the environment destroying plagiarism engine and filing off the rough bits, what students are in theory paying us for is to learn, which they don’t do by skipping the brain engagement of writing their own work.
We still get a number who use LLMs badly enough to get caught.
OH, CRAP! Please read this. Cheating might be the least of our worries. Likely true and a scary indication of the trajectory of our decaying violent academic society
California Universities Are Stockpiling AR-15s, Grenades and Submachine Guns. Students Fear They Will Be Used to Quash Student Dissent.
Phoebe Huss / CalMatters
https://www.rsn.org/001/california-universities-are-stockpiling-ar15s-grenades-and-submachine-guns-students-fear-they-will-be-used-to-quash-student-dissent.html
Most here will label this tl:dr. But, it is authoritative regarding reading and scholasticism:
I’ll read the whole thing while I listen to Martha and the Vandellas
The End of Reading Is Here
Rose Horowitch The Atlantic 20260709
https://www.rsn.org/001/the-end-of-reading-is-here.html
In my university, oral exams are very common and it makes it very easy to detect students who rely on AI because there is no way to fake understanding during an oral exam. Despite this, a lot of students do rely on AI and they completely flop during the exam. As to why they do it, knowing that they cannot pass the exam, my suspicion is that they have relied so much AI, that by the exam time it is far too gone and there is no chance for them to be able to catch up.
Doesn’t it strike you that something you plan to read claims the end of reading is here?
(How you can read it when the end of reading is here is… interesting)
—
Lemme take a look… Wow, verbose as fuck.
<skims>
Ah, right. One of those. Clickbait title that is the opposite of the lede.
(My emphasis)
Morales (Captain Hyperliteral):
“The end of reading can only mean no one is interpreting written words anymore”.
Also Morales:
“<skims>”
X-D