‘Humanity has chosen to become idiots’: This Brown professor switched to take-home exams after a mass shooting and discovered mass cheating

When Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano changed the format of his midterm exam last spring, he was thinking about his students’ mental health, not academic fraud. Two of them had been shot, including Ella Cook, a young woman who had sat in his office just days before the December 13 massacre at Brown University and asked him to be her academic advisor. “We had a very nice conversation,” Serrano recalled in an interview with Fortune. “She was a wonderful young woman, full of energy, full of ideas. Imagine my shock when a few days after that conversation took place, they released the names of the two mortal victims, and I saw that one of them was her.” In that grief, Serrano made a decision he had never made in his 34-year career at Brown and gave his ECON 1170 class—an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics—a take-home, closed-book midterm. He wanted to remove the stress of sitting in a classroom on a campus where, he says, quite a few students were still too traumatized to set foot. Two of his students had been among the nine wounded in the attack; they fought for their lives for weeks, and both survived. What Serrano got instead of gratitude was the largest known AI-assisted cheating scandal in the Ivy League, as previously reported by El Pais. Cheating on a mass scale Of the 86 students who took the March 5 exam, 40 scored a perfect 100. The class average was 96 whereas in previous years, the average had ranged between 65 and 80—and this exam, by design, was harder than usual. “The beauty of take-home exams used to be that we professors were able to challenge students a little more, just to push them to a higher level,” Serrano said. “The fact that this was a harder exam and this distribution made it absolutely clear that something very unusual had happened.” Serrano got tipped off by something that was just too smart, he said. “Some answers contained unusual passages that coincid