How AI Is Ruining Education, In One Handy Chart

Of the many things AI is ruining, higher education is up there–graduation speakers are urging students to sacrifice their futures to a handful of rich guys, school systems are shoehorning it into every possible crevice, and even students fear it’s rotting their brains. It’s not news that students are using AI to cheat, but I’ve never seen it summed up so neatly until today.

Inside Higher Ed ran an article Wednesday titled “Brown Professor Suspects Majority Of His Class Used AI To Cheat.” It tells the story of Roberto Serrano, an economics professor at the Rhode Island school who noticed a huge discrepancy between his students’ grades on their take-home midterm and their in-person finals. 

Before we go on, I just need to highlight this bonkers lede, which states that “Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so ‘it was appropriate,’ [Serrano] said, to allow students to take their exams at home.” Students got a take-home midterm because they were afraid of being shot–and then they used this both reasonable and horrifying accommodation, Serrano suspects, to use AI on their tests.

Students scored an average of 96 on the take-home midterm, where Serrano said grades traditionally fell between 65 and 80. The unusually high grades and some odd arguments students made led Serrano to suspect AI, so he told students that the final would be taken in class. If the final grades matched the midterms, no problem; if they didn’t, he’d void the midterm grades and make the final count for more.

Eighteen students dropped the class, nine just didn’t take the final at all, and here’s how the rest of them did: 

absolutely insane story, and yeah, just looking at this chart... with the exception of maybe two people, this entire class was cheating like motherfuckers

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— Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li (@sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com) July 8, 2026 at 7:38 AM

First, let’s shout out Student 22, who got a 55 on the midterm and a 59 on the final, the only student to show improvement. As someone who worked their ass off in a few grad school classes only to just barely pass, I feel confident this is the real human work of someone who is in way over their head. Keep on trying, buddy.

Let’s also give a nod to Student 1, whose 95.5 on the midterm and 95 on the final feel like a real kid who’s good at this class. If you simply must cheat on a test, sitting next to them and trying to see their paper would have been the classic, and more environmentally friendly, choice.

There’s a few other plausible spreads here, so it seems likely the entire class didn’t cheat. But then you get the mind-blowing bits: students who scored 100 on the midterm only to get in the 40s and below on the final.  Student 41 went from 94.5 to 37. Student 52 went from 100 to 19. Student 54 went from 100 to 16.5. A couple students went from 100 to zero. Inside Higher Ed writes that “the average score on the final was 48.6 percent—by far a historic low, [Serrano] said. Previously, the average final exam score had never dropped below 65 percent.”

Serrano made the final worth 80 percent of the students’ grades, and passed anyone who got a 40 or above, lowering his traditional cutoff of 50. Nineteen students subsequently failed the class.

The bigger point of this story is Serrano’s efforts to get Brown to address the cheating. He claims the university has shown little interest in dealing with his situation, and this also highlights the lack of systems many schools have for addressing mass cheating as opposed to looking at each individual case. 

But I simply cannot get over seeing the situation laid out like this: the stark visual evidence of exactly how little students are doing their own work, and how much AI seems to be doing the mental lifting for them. AI is often touted as a tool of convenience, doing the scut work around knowledge tasks to free people up for the more interesting bits. But that’s so obviously not what’s happening here. Many students didn’t struggle without AI; they failed spectacularly, or, maybe more damning, didn’t even bother to try, dropping the class or just not showing up. This is at Brown, one of the nation’s top schools, and students are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars not just to not learn anything, but to humiliate themselves in the process. 

My own higher ed grades were occasionally sub-par, but at least I did it to myself. Have some self-respect, kids.

Brown Professor Suspects Most of His Class Used AI to Cheat

Brown University leaders’ response to the alleged cheating incident has been “meek,” the professor said.

Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and JobsEmma Whitford