Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

Brown professor Roberto Serrano suspected students were leaning on artificial intelligence to get through take-home economics exams, so he brought the final back into the classroom. The result was brutal: scores reportedly fell by about 50 percent, and the comments instantly turned into a digital food fight over whether this exposed mass cheating, a broken school system, or both. The loudest reaction was pure doomposting. One commenter flatly announced, "At-home testing is dead," while others argued that grades and even fancy degrees now risk meaning a lot less if chatbot help is everywhere.

The thread also had plenty of side-eye. One reader mocked the article’s opening claim that Ivy League students are “by definition” intelligent, basically saying, absolutely not, next question. Another joked that survey numbers about how many students use AI regularly were almost certainly low because, in their words, the rest are lying. That mix of cynicism and dark humor gave the whole discussion a very “everybody knows what’s going on, but now there’s data” vibe.

Then came the real spice: some commenters treated AI cheating like a full-blown social crisis, with one even suggesting it should be punished like a crime. Others zoomed out and painted an apocalyptic picture of a generation stuck with worthless credentials and fewer entry-level jobs. In other words, this wasn’t just a campus scandal to the community—it was a referendum on whether education itself is quietly becoming one big open-book illusion