Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%

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• Hacker News
• ' “56 percent of undergraduate respondents [at Brown] and 67 percent of graduate and medical student respondents reported intentionally using GenAI tools daily or weekly,” '

  and the rest are lying.

  (With apologies to the original example of anomalous self-reporting)

  by readthenotes1
• > Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent.

  I stopped reading after the first sentence.

  by lapcat
• “Rich”
  by otikik
• technically, they invented the IQ to test their IQs so, this mighe be strictly correcg.
  by cyanydeez
• Hey, a typical person should be intelligent because we human have used ourselves as a de-facto definition of intelligence anyway. That sentence probably means something like "no intellectually disabled person here". Even though we don't normally feel so because higher educations seem "typical" to us.
  by lifthrasiir
• Ars Technica has gotten very bad over the years. IMHO not worth reading for many, many years now.
  by tangenter
• I agree that they are intelligent, just don't know about the "definition" part. A typical Ivy Leaguer isn't a dumbass. What's wrong with calling one intelligent?

  Try visiting a Walmart and interacting with literally anyone. That's the average. Let's not allow our egos to gatekeep who we consider intelligent, fellow HNians.

  by midtake
• I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.
  by cowanon77
• At-home testing is dead.
  by cm2012
• Have you never had a home proctored test before?

  You cant even sneak paper on to your desk, where do you plan to hide the LLM?

  by protocolture
• How is this even a debate? Before Covid most tests were in person right? Sure some classes had final projects that were take home, but in person tests were very norma. So what’s all the hand wringing about? Just do in person tests and move on?
  by therealdrag0
• Just wait a few decades until brain-machine interfaces will become a mass-market thing.
  by drdaeman
• That would be good.

  https://www.baneproctoring.com/

  by Cider9986
• It is. I think the professor here was being naive, but I appreciate his optimism. When I was in college (in the 90s), take home exams allowed a knowledgeable student to really shine. I’m not saying that they weren’t eminently cheatable back then—they were—but they also had the odd side-effect that, if it was a class you cared about, the test itself could be a learning experience.

  For context, I am also a faculty member at a highly selective college. I had a similar shocking realization last year that it was likely that there was widespread cheating on homework assignments, which I used to favor heavily toward their grades. To verify my suspicions, I generated custom tests for every student in the class: the exam included code from students’ own programming assignment submissions. All I asked them to do was explain what they wrote.

  The class performed badly on this exam, and the results were strongly bimodal. Roughly half the class aced the exam. The other half could make neither heads nor tails out of the code. For the students who wrote things like “lol, i have no idea” (real response) I opened honor cases.

  I think many faculty right now are going through the stages of grief. We all knew that even at selective institutions, cheating existed, that many students were in it for the credentials. But as long as the numbers of known cases was low, we could convince ourselves that the few doing it were outliers. When a class does it en masse, it’s more than a slap in the face; it makes you feel like a chump. Have we been fooling ourselves this entire time? Was all the time I spent becoming a subject-matter expert a waste? Are the students just rolling their eyes when I turn my back? Those thoughts hurt. I personally chose to become a faculty member because it seemed like research and teaching were the best ways to maximize my impact.

  I still have some hope. After all, I still spend my days working and socializing with like-minded thinkers, some of whom are truly brilliant. And every year, a handful of students come out of the woodwork and surprise me. But it’s hard not to think that the group of people who find joy in learning and creating is shrinking.

  by raddan
• What's even worse than so many students cheating with AI is that I suspect a substantial portion of them don't even think that's "cheating".
  by wrs
• Seems like an application of Goodhart's law; measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.

  This was a lot harder to cheat before AI, but now the floodgates are open and grades and degrees earned post-AI are showing that they mean little.

  Cheating on college tests should be a jailable criminal offense (similar to computer fraud) so that there is dignity in the degree again. Considering the money involved, I don't see why not.

  But this probably won't happen, because many rich people are very happy to buy their degrees. See also [1]

  https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/09/the-real-reason-student...

  by avaer
• > measuring worth by degree or grades stopped measuring learning or ability.

  It still does if the test is in person

  by croes
• >so that there is dignity in the degree again.

  How far back do you need to go to get to a time when degrees mattered?

  by tayo42
• You don’t even need to go that far. If they just expelled cheaters instead of trying to sweep it under the rug and ignore it that would go a long way.
  by nkrisc
• The article, the teacher, and the general academic community skips the hard question when it comes to AI and that's whether these exams are testing knowledge that is still worth internalizing in the same way?

  Academia has a long history of lagging behind acceptance of new cognitive tools where they claim to want to defend the students, but instead defend the assignments of the past at the expense of the students. Calculators were treated as threats to learning, even though they ultimately freed students to focus on higher-level math and provably improved their abilities across many different studies. Internet sources were dismissed as less legitimate than books, as if “published in an outdated book from the 70s” magically made it more trustworthy than the most scrutinized reference sources online.

  It is not clear from the article exactly how much of this course falls into that category, but if the answers can be produced trivially with a prompt and chatgpt, then maybe memorizing that material is no longer the right educational target. Academia desperately needs to redesign itself around AI as a cognitive tool students should be trained to leverage. If a question is trivially answered by a prompt with it, then you need harder questions that actually require students to push beyond that. Simply removing AI from the equation, calling it cheating, and pretending that it isn't an ever-present asset people are expected to leverage in real life is naive and just repeats the mistakes of the past.

  by iepathos
• I don't think there's anything wrong with asking for things that can be prompted. You still need to understand the why behind things, being able to reason about them and choose between options. How will you teach this level of understanding or certify them without exams?

  Of course, not all testing is good, but the written exam has survived and proven useful despite the internet age, I'm not sure an even better search engine really changes that.

  by episteme
• This is already a clusterfuck, but it's going to be so much worse in 10 years. We're going to have an entire generation trapped in the gig economy because their education is going to be considered worthless, and even if it wasn't worthless, there won't be enough entry level jobs for anyone to get into. Senior people will age out and our entire society is just going to be hollowed out.

  And people wonder why I'm an AI hater.

  by overgard
• The thing you're angry at, the thing that you're upset about? It's capitalism, it's the coupling of education with jobs, it's credentialism being overturned by new technology, etc.

  I think education is incredibly important, but I understand that I'm going to have to retrain myself a little bit. A college degree can no-longer be assumed to be a proxy for having put in the effort to deeply study something.

  Now what's the solution for this? I don't know, but we have made the mistake of conflating pieces of paper for expertise. And I say that as someone with 3 degrees.

  Thinking back to my time as a professional pilot before I medicaled out and pivoted into tech, the FAA really (for all it's problems) has a pretty good system to train and test new pilots.

  You have to have some hours with a certified instructor and some hours on your own. The tests to become a certified instructor are considered challenging, and many people fail. Then you take a written test, then you take a practical test. It's one on one. You and the examiner. And if you do not meet the standard, you fail. That's "ok." It's just fine to fail people who do poorly during a checkride. They go back, they get retrained, and they do it again.

  If you have a lot of failures during training, you'll have to answer for them in interviews later on, but often times there's a sort of holistic treatment to it. If you busted a checkride 15 years ago, and have since been fine, you'll be ok. If it's a recurring theme, you'll have a hard time finding a job (and that's the right thing, IMO). But the format of "Written, Oral Exam, and Practical Exam" is the "right" model for making sure people know wtf they are doing.

  How do we do that in tech? Hell if I know, maybe a proctored written exam, followed by an oral exam, then a project? But who knows.

  by piloto_ciego
• Recent and related:

  Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708991 - June 2026 (728 comments)

  by dang