An economics professor at Brown University suspects most of his 86 students used AI to cheat on a take-home exam that averaged 96 percent. When he made the final an in-person test, 18 students dropped the course, nine didn't show up, and the average fell to 48.6 percent. Two large studies from China and UC Berkeley back up his case: where students lean on AI for homework, their proctored exam scores tank.

When Brown University economics professor Robert Serrano suspected that most of his students had used AI to cheat on a take-home midterm exam, he decided to compare...

Are students outsourcing critical thinking to AI tools?