Is the academic world facing the issue of certificates with high CGPAs not necessarily making the holder smart? This is the question that economics lecturer Professor Roberto Serrano, who teaches at Brown University, USA, wants to answer.
He has been teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory classes for the past 20 years and when there was a shooting incident on campus, he allowed students to take the mid-year test at home for safety reasons. When all the question papers were reviewed, the average score of the students was 96% which is outside the normal score of 68-80% of the exam results that were previously conducted.
Prof Serrano then made it mandatory to take the exam in class because he suspected that the students were cheating using artificial intelligence (AI). As a result, 18 out of 86 students immediately stopped taking the class. A further 9 students did not show up to sit for the new exam that was held. The remaining 59 students who took the exam in class recorded an average score of 48.6% which is much lower than the previous average.
This is a surprising result because Brown University is among the 8 most prestigious Ivy League universities in the United States. Only the best and brightest students are accepted due to the high number of annual applications. If AI fraud occurs at prestigious universities, what about other universities?
Three years ago when ChatGPT was launched, many Stanford University students who are very tech-savvy admitted to using it to do class assignments as a smart move. This is the story of the GPT 1.0 era, not GPT 5.6 which was just launched this morning. The situation may be more serious now.
Only a few countries like Norway have started to impose restrictions on the use of AI in the classroom. In Erling Braut Haaland's country, students aged 6-13 are completely prohibited from using it. Students aged 13-16 are allowed to use it under the supervision of their class teacher. Finally, students aged 17-19 are advised to use AI only if necessary so that they are prepared for future students and work.
