No! You’re saying students cheat?

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.

Are they unable to find candidates without misogynistic traits?

I’ve avoided discussing Graham Platner here all this time. I could tell early in his rise that his campaign was going to be an ugly mess that was going to tempt a lot of good people to support him. Bernie Sanders endorsed him!

Right away, I thought “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t sport a Nazi tattoo?”

Then there were the old internet posts, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t have a history of internet bigotry?”

Then we got the accounts of crude drunken behavior on dates, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who don’t treat women with disrespect?”

Now the latest damning accusation has emerged, prompting Platner to finally drop out, and I thought, “Are there no working class progressive candidates in Maine who haven’t raped someone?”

So I was useless on this issue, because I was too busy backing away from this growing clusterfuck. Rebecca Watson has a more forthright response.

Let’s learn to more quickly recognize disqualifying characteristics in our candidates, OK? How about if we don’t make excuses for them anymore?

Darwin came up with memetics?

Oh boy, chew on this comment on my YouTube channel:

@Toytime-TV
I Got you PZ…It goes like Yah, Darwin noticed adaptation and developed an expansive theory to encompass his study of that progress in an attempt to understand the nature and origin of creation because the vastness of his theory held millennia of time spans causing him see patterns and repetition throughout the ages, which caused him to then develop the theory of memetics, which sir truly is the language of the divine as it can only be understood over long periods of study, causing one to MUST believe in an Originator of the system of sequences he had uncovered. Most of your smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, even if they loosened the ideology and imagery. You can believe too PZ, being a smart man like you denotes, you must. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmgYIzpSGgk

Don’t bother with the included link: it’s just an old one-eyed man dancing. No real content.

This is somehow a reply to my video in which I said that evolution wasn’t simply made up by some guy, Darwin. The comment starts out OK, saying that Darwin developed a theory to explain what he observed in nature…but then they go on to say that Darwin invented memetics (not true, you can blame Dawkins for that one), and that it is a divine language and that you MUST believe it originated in a creator. I think we’ve all heard that before. Then they tell us that the smartest people throughout all of time held the belief of a creator, and concludes with a little flattery that being a smart man I must also believe.

I guess I’m not as smart as @Toytime believes, because that is a load of horseshit.

Another reason to have voted for Kamala

Just ask Doug Wilson.

“If Kamala [Harris] had won the presidency, there would have been basically zero evangelicals in the White House administration,” Wilson said. “And although Donald Trump is not an evangelical by any stretch … his administration is full of them.”

Doug has something in common with Richard Dawkins.

“So probably the best illustration of this would be church bells? Yes. Minarets? No,” he said.

Why?

“Because, the public space would belong to Christ,” he added.

He also doesn’t want women to vote, let alone run for high office.

Wilson also wants to repeal women’s right to vote. When asked why, he was quick to respond.

“Because it’s a good idea,” he said, adding that he wants it replaced with household voting, with women only voting if they are the head of their household.

I voted for Kamala Harris. It’s nice that a pig like Doug Wilson is reassuring me that my vote was righteous.

Jeanson sinking deeper into the swamp

Portrait of a pseudoscientist

Nathaniel Jeanson, that incompetent “geneticist” who was employed by Answers in Genesis, has a new gig: he has been hired by Columbia International University as a visiting research professor. This is not a step up in prominence. It’s actually kind of a step backwards, but the creationists will crow about the words without recognizing the meaning.

A “visiting research professor” is often a prestigious appointment, but it’s not an effective research position — it’s more of an attempt to bring a big name into connection with a university, and possibly forge new partnerships (Note: Jeanson is not a big name, except to the intellectually impoverished creationist community.) I’d be interested to know what the quid pro quo here might be, because he’s not going to improve the reputation of CIU.

Curiously, if you read that announcement from CIU, there’s no reference to Answers in Genesis anywhere in it. They name-drop Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, but the noisy loud creationist/Christian organization that has been associated with him for years? Not a whisper.

It’s unclear what they are going to accomplish with this appointment. He is still employed at AiG, they don’t discuss what his teaching duties will be, other than just talking to students. This is purely an attempt to swap titles and connections, but CIU is going to do this without openly acknowledging AiG.

This is also not going to help Jeanson’s career. CIU is a private Christian college that used to be called Columbia Bible College. It requires a whole lot of fundamentalist bullshit to graduate from there.

There are seven doctrinal points which students must consent to as a part of their admission to and candidacy for a degree from CIU. These are biblical inspiration, natural separation of humanity from God, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, the historical doctrine of the Trinity, the bodily resurrection of Christ from the dead, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer, and the evangelical mandate to witness to the gospel of Christ. The doctrine of Premillennialism is officially held by the school, but students are not required to adhere to this doctrine. CIU requires all teaching faculty to affirm Premillennialism.

That’s a fake school. It’s a Sunday School with delusions of grandeur.

Chlodnik night!

It’s unpleasantly hot and humid — we just had a thunderstorm drench us — so I decided to try something completely different and made chlodnik, a cold beet soup.

I found the recipe here. If you try it, caution: the proportions there are sufficient for a whole family of 6 or more. We’re going to have chlodnik oozing out of our pores for a few days. Next time I’ll cut everything in half.

The flavor is interesting. Imagine digging up everything in a Slavic peasant’s garden, chopping it up fine, and drowning it in yoghurt, kefir, and sour cream.

It’s cold, though, which was the important criterion.

We already knew Bryan Johnson was going to die someday

Remember Bryan Johnson? Here’s a reminder of his silly obsession.

Johnson famously claims to spend millions on his health each year, which goes towards keeping a personal army of doctors on hand who constantly monitor his biomarkers, and help carry out more unorthodox health interventions like swapping his blood out with his younger son’s and monitoring his nighttime boners (though he’s seemed to pare things back as of late).

Unfortunately, poor little Bryan is sick.

Bryan Johnson, in his quest for eternal youth, has been dealt a mortal blow.

Last week, the longevity-obsessed tech investor revealed that he had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease in which his “stomach is eating itself.”

He’s got autoimmune gastritis. It’s not a mortal illness, but it is a serious and uncomfortable chronic disease, nothing to be made light of. Pity him, but don’t plan the funeral just yet.

Besides, he’s going to turn this into a profit-making drama.

But, true to his mission, Johnson believes he can biohack his way out of this gut-punch, too.

“I’m going to try and solve it,” he wrote on X. “Will share all.”

The man is rich, he already spends millions of dollars on his health every year, and gastritis is a manageable illness. I’m pretty sure he’s going to live through this, it’s just become a significantly more uncomfortable process.

But someday, he will die.

Schrodinger’s McConnell

Mitch McConnell has been MIA for a few weeks. Credible sources say he’s been in the hospital since 14 June, “recovering”.

Laura Loomer says he is “brain dead” and never coming back.

Who are you going to believe? I think we’ve caught Loomer in a lie. McConnell is a Republican, if you’re going to say he’s brain dead, I’m going to ask, “how can you tell?”