Brown University Prof Suspects AI Cheating, Orders In-Person Final; Scores Plummet 50%

This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.

And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.

Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.

This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.

Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.

But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]

https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...

What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".

At-home testing is dead.

The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?

Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.

It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes […]

I like the quote at the end

"we cannot choose to become idiots"

Disallowing the use of AI is basically the modern equivalent of testing based on memorization. It is a laziness to find something more useful to evaluate on or an inability to distinguish real understanding in a field from first level understanding.

Professors need to step up and teach value beyond what LLMs know (very possible with or without LLMS). Or get out of the way from those building on the field with LLMs.

If you’re teaching students something that LLMs can score 100 on you are not adequately teaching them something useful for them in the future.