How a Blind Professor Saw Through His Students’ Cheating
The Algorithmic Bridge Alberto Romero
A blind Brown professor made his econ midterm take-home after a campus shooting. Forty students scored a perfect 100 with AI help — and got caught.
Based on reporting by The Algorithmic Bridge, Alberto Romero — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Roberto Serrano teaches mathematical economics at Brown University. Born in Madrid, he began losing his sight as a teenager, and this past December he made a decision meant to be kind: after a gunman killed two students on campus, he let his class take the midterm at home rather than force anyone back into a room.
Forty students turned that gesture into a shortcut. The class average landed at 96, in a course that historically runs between 65 and 80. The exam itself was tough. And when Serrano looked closer, the answers he was reading looked eerily like what ChatGPT would produce given the same problems.
So he pulled the rope back. The final exam went in person, no exceptions. Scores collapsed — the average dropped from 96 all the way down to 48. That number doesn't even count the 27 students who dropped the class or simply didn't show up for the final, 22 of whom had posted a perfect 100 on the take-home midterm.
Served with the results, Serrano didn't mince words. "We cannot choose to become idiots," he said, warning that when a generation's most promising students decide cheating is fine, it points toward "a declining society, to a failed society." He's not talking about a handful of students gaming a system. He's talking about what happens when almost everyone does.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Forty perfect scores followed by a 48-point average once the safety net came off tells its own story — those weren't forty geniuses, they were forty people who'd outsourced their thinking and got exposed the moment the trust was withdrawn. Universities love to respond to this kind of thing with a new clause in the academic code or a mandatory orientation workshop, and none of it will matter, because soft policy doesn't survive contact with a tool this easy to use. If a degree stops meaning
Read more about this at: The Algorithmic Bridge
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