AI-generated with Grok
A story out of Brown University is making the rounds, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the state of so-called “elite” higher education in America today. Brown's economics department runs a notoriously difficult course that historically draws small numbers of students and averages somewhere between sixty-five and eighty percent on exams. This semester, eighty-six students signed up and the professor made the midterm a take-home exam. The class average came back at ninety-six percent. Several students scored a perfect one hundred.
The professor, Roberto Serrano, was suspicious. The answers were technically correct but oddly written — what he described as a very convoluted style. He and his graduate students ran the exam questions through ChatGPT and got similar results. So he made a decision. He told students the final would be in-person, and that if their scores weren't in roughly the same ballpark as the midterm, the midterm would be declared void.
Twenty-seven students immediately dropped the course. Nine more didn't show up for the final. Twenty-two of those twenty-seven had scored perfect hundreds on the midterm. Among those who actually sat for the in-person final, the class average collapsed from ninety-six to forty-eight percent.
The professor who caught all of this is himself a remarkable man. Roberto Serrano went blind from retinal dystrophy at seventeen. He learned Braille, kept studying, and earned his way to Harvard on merit — not on accommodations, not on lowered standards, not on DEI admissions. That probably explains why he couldn't ignore these results.
His warning is worth hearing. He told Inside Higher Ed: “we cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is okay. …That leads to a declining society, to a failed society. …We cannot choose to become idiots.”
Brown's own internal research found that over half of undergraduate students and two-thirds of graduate and medical students use AI daily or weekly — and that most of them are worried about what it is doing to their ability to actually think. They know the shortcut is making them weaker. They keep using it anyway.
This is what happens when institutions spend years fighting harder for DEI than for academic integrity. The prestigious name survives. The substance underneath it quietly disappears.
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