Economics Professor Robert Serrano normally holds in-person exams for his ECON 1170: “Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory” class, but this semester he decided to assign a take-home, closed-book exam for the first midterm to alleviate pressure for students after the Dec. 13 shooting.
But after the class’s grade distributions indicated widespread cheating, Serrano has decided to return to in-person exams for all of his courses. The median for the exam was 98%, with 40 out of 86 students scoring 100%.
Compared to previous data, the distribution for his first ECON 1170 midterm was “absolutely ridiculous,” especially since he had designed a more challenging exam for the take-home format, Serrano said in an interview with The Herald.
“Historically, the average grade in the midterm exams ranged from 65 to 85,” Serrano said.
After investigating the exam results, Serrano said he found signs of AI use and collaboration amongst students.
The answer to one of the exam questions, for example, is a “very simple, direct proof,” Serrano said. ChatGPT constructs a “very convoluted contradiction argument,” which appeared in many students’ exams.
Serrano also noticed that the exams of students who often study together were “absolutely identical,” with points lost on the same questions.
After hearing about the suspected cheating in Serrano’s class, Assistant Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship Bobby Pakzad-Hurson does not plan to give take-home exams in the foreseeable future. “I don’t see how, especially after seeing this, any faculty member could have any confidence in a take-home exam,” he added.
Pakzad-Hurson also suspects student AI use on homework assignments.
“The biggest shift is just that students are seemingly a lot better at homework now,” Pakzad-Hurson said. He has noticed “perfect performance” on homeworks and “poor performance” on tests. Pakzad-Hurson lowered the weight of homeworks on students’ overall grades to reduce the incentive to submit AI work.
Economics Professor Rajiv Vohra noted that AI does not appear to be a problem with in-person exams, but may be an issue with homeworks or take-home exams.
Teaching Professor of Economics Sylvia Kuo has also noticed potential AI usage on her homework assignments, even though they are graded based on effort. She said she has seen “weird answers” that still arrive at a solution, but use terminology that is inconsistent “with what was taught.”
In the last year, Kuo has also seen a decrease in exam scores, despite the fact that the content of exams has been “roughly” the same since she started teaching the course more than a decade ago. She said this suggests students are not using their “own brain” to do the “learning in order to perform well on exams.”
In cases of cheating incidents that go through the academic code violation process, Kuo said students are usually “in a bad situation and they didn’t study, and they’re panicking like crazy.” In those moments, “they make bad choices.”
When an instructor submits an academic code allegation, it is routed through an administration before reaching the Standing Committee for the Academic Code. All allegations are reviewed by Associate Dean of the College for the Academic Code Love Wallace.
“Students who violate the academic code are almost never doing it from a malicious place,” Wallace wrote in an email to The Herald. “Generally speaking it’s a split second decision that comes from a place of trying to handle immense external or internal pressure.”
“I think a lot of people cheat because they have a lot that’s going on in their life,” said Liam Fitzgerald ’28, a business economics concentrator. “They could take the easy way out to cheat with homework assignments (and) tests because they don’t believe that they can learn the material in the time that they put into it.”
Genie Dickens ’28, a biology and economics concentrator, said that some of the cheating in the economics department may be due to practice exams students are given.
“It makes it easier to cheat, because you know what’s going to be on the test,” said Dickens. “Sometimes people will write the formulas for the exams and stuff, whether it’s in their calculator or on a note.”
Because a lot of economics classes are graded on a curve — where 30 or 40% of the class receive an A — students may feel extra pressure to get an A which “creates a mindset where students are more likely to cheat,” said Irene Zheng ’28, an applied math-economics concentrator.
Ivy Huang is a University News and Science & Research editor from New York City. Concentrating in English, she has a passion for literature and American history. Her favorite authors include Marilynne Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Toni Morrison. Outside of writing, she enjoys playing basketball, watching documentaries, and beating her high score on Subway Surfers.
