It Happened Again

Written by Al Slivinski on July 16, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

Some of you may remember two posts I wrote recently, here and here, about a cheating ‘scandal’ that occurred at my old employer. Nothing more has come of that, so far as I know, but to my surprise, an almost-identical event has recently been covered in The Free Press. This university cheating story has a local connection too, so I will tell you a bit about it.

The TFP article, posted on July 12, is titled:

I’m a Brown University Professor. Half My Students Are Cheating.

Brown is an Ivy League U located in Providence, Rhode Island. The Professor is one Roberto Serrano, and he is the reason for the local (and personal) connection. When Serrano had just completed his PhD in Econ, he was looking for his first faculty position, and my old Department invited him to UWO for a campus visit. Nothing remarkable about that, but what is remarkable about Serrano is that, as well as being brilliant, he is totally blind. In those days, people gave talks about their research by either writing on a blackboard or projecting transparencies on a screen. Serrano did neither of those things at UWO, he stood in front of the room and spoke for 90 minutes about his highly mathematical research.

It was an amazing performance, we voted immediately after his visit to offer him a faculty position, but Brown U felt the same way, and that is where he went. He is still there 34 years later, and has written this article for TFP about his recent encounter with student cheating.

The tale is nearly a carbon copy of the one I wrote about at UWO. Serrano gave a take-home midterm exam in a senior undergrad econ course, and realized that nearly all his students had cheated on it. He reported this fact to Brown’s Committee on The Academic Code.

The Committee ignored him. Serrano, angry, went public, writing an entire story about the event for a publication called El Pais. This was then picked up by Inside Higher Ed, which Serrano writes ‘inspired a further cascade of coverage’.

That all prompted the Committee to finally respond to Serrano, asking for more information about student cheating.

Now, this event inspires in me the same question that arose in the UWO case: Why in the hell would any prof give his class a take-home exam? Worse, Serrano says he gave the students an 11-hour window in which to complete and submit the answers to a two-hour exam.

His reason is rather typically 21^st century. You may recall that there was a shooting on the Brown campus a while back. That had just happened, so Serrano writes

‘…due to the tragic shooting that took place at Brown on December 13 during a review session for a final exam, I decided to move my course’s two exams—the midterm and the final—from an in-class exam to a take-home, closed-book format. I thought that would help students deal with exam anxiety.’

I’m sorry Roberto, brilliant though you may be, that makes no sense. It is exactly the kind of thinking that has resulted in a reported 40% of Stanford undergrads being granted extra time to take tests. Misplaced empathy. Or maybe sympathy. Definitely misplaced.

There is more. When the midterm take-home test turned up all this cheating, Serrano reversed himself and announced to the class that the final exam would be a three-hour in-class test, instead of the take-home.

Enrollment in the class, which had historically been only about 15 students, had swelled to 86 when Serrano announced at the beginning of the term that the midterm and final tests would be take-home. Only 59 took the final exam, the rest having dropped the course. Of the 27 who dropped, 20 had gotten a mark of 100 on the midterm. The average on the take-home midterm was a mark of 96/100 while on the in-class final it was 48.

I quote from Serrano’s TFP article again:

Incredibly, Love Wallace, the associate dean of the College for the Academic Code, who reviews all academic code allegations, seemed to agree with them. “Students who violate the academic code,” she said, “are almost never doing it from a malicious place. Generally speaking it’s a split-second decision that comes from a place of trying to handle immense external or internal pressure.”

Serrano calls bullshit on that. I do, too. I also hasten to note that a person whose parents actually gave her the name ‘Love’ is just the sort of person who ends up in academia as a useless associate dean.

I think the brilliant Professor Serrano did ask for this by giving that take-home midterm, but I stand with him in being appalled by the attitudes of university administrators, whether at UWO or Brown or wherever, toward student cheating. That refusal to enforce standards of academic integrity goes back to long before the advent of AI, however.

One of the last lines that Serrano writes is:

Academia is supposed to be one of our great beacons of truth.

Well, yea, Roberto – ‘supposed to’ is right.

CODA: CBC shows up late

After I had written this post, I came across an article on the website of our fearless public news organization, the CBC, titled

A U.S. prof suspects most of his students used AI to cheat. It’s a growing concern here, too

It recapitulates the Serrano story I just told you. Sadly, I didn’t get government money to write mine. But, typical of the CBC, it gives credit for first covering it not to that terrible right-wing rag TFP, but to El Pais, which, to be fair, was published first, on June 28.

Also true to form, the CBC writer went to the trouble to find an ‘expert’, one Rina Garcia Chua, who ‘manages’ UBC Okanagan’s Academic Integrity Matters (AIM) program.

Ms Chua is quoted as follows regarding students who cheat:

“Most are students who are confused. There’s miscommunication. They’re overwhelmed,” she said, noting that most tend to be first-year students.’

Yea, No, Rina. Serrano said his course was a senior course, not a first-year student in the room. Did anyone actually read what Serrano wrote?