Roberto Serrano, who has taught at Brown for 34 years, gave a take-home midterm in his advanced undergraduate welfare economics course for the first time, he told Inside Higher Ed in June.
He relaxed the format for students still shaken by the Dec. 13 mass shooting at Brown, where a gunman killed two students and wounded nine.
Two of the wounded were his students. One of those killed had asked him days earlier to be her academic adviser, he told Fortune.
Enrollment in a course that usually drew up to 30 students jumped to 86, which Serrano ties to the take-home promise.
The March 5 midterm came back with a 96% average and 40 perfect scores out of 86, Spanish daily El País reported. The course's midterm had historically averaged 65% to 80%, and he had written this version to be harder than usual.
