June 28, 2026
Midterm Mayhem
Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
Brown’s AI cheating scandal explodes as commenters ask: who’s really to blame
TLDR: A Brown professor says at least 50 students used AI to cheat on a take-home economics exam, calling it a major academic scandal. Commenters are battling over whether the students are the problem or whether giving a take-home test in the AI era was asking for disaster.
Brown University has a full-on campus scandal after economics professor Roberto Serrano said he found conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated with artificial intelligence on a take-home midterm. That alone is huge. But the real fireworks came when readers basically split into two raging camps: Team “students cheated, obviously” and Team “what did you think would happen with a take-home test?” One of the loudest reactions was pure disbelief that anyone would hand out a remote exam in 2025 and expect students not to use every tool they could get their hands on. In comment-section terms: the exam format was being treated like the unattended plate of cookies at a party.
Others were less interested in blaming one professor and more interested in the pressure-cooker culture at elite schools. Their argument? If students think classmates are secretly using AI, internships are brutal to get, and grades are curved, then cheating starts to feel less like villainy and more like an arms race. That take turned the story from "bad students got caught" into "the whole system is cracking." Meanwhile, another crowd went full doom mode, joking that the real victim here is the take-home exam itself, because this scandal may have just signed its death certificate. And hovering over all of it is Serrano’s bigger complaint: Brown’s leadership seemed slow and quiet, which only fueled more outrage that universities may still be acting like this is a small classroom problem instead of a giant academic trust crisis.
Key Points
- •Roberto Serrano says he found conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on a March midterm in Brown University’s ECON 1170 mathematical economics course.
- •The article describes the case as the biggest known cheating scandal of its kind at Brown and in the Ivy League.
- •Serrano says Brown’s top leadership initially gave little response until he brought the matter to the Academic Code Committee, which later called it “a wake-up call.”
- •Serrano argues that universities should publicly acknowledge the seriousness of AI-related cheating and debate the scale of the problem in higher education.
- •The article also profiles Serrano’s academic career, his specialization in game theory, and his continued teaching and research after losing his sight at age 17.