Grades dropped from 96 to 48 percent when a Brown professor made students take the exam without AI

A Brown University economics professor mandated an in-person final exam after students recorded an unusually high 96 percent average on a take-home test. Following the switch, the exam average dropped to 48.6 percent, with nearly a third of the class either withdrawing or failing to appear. The discrepancy suggests that widespread unauthorized use of artificial intelligence likely inflated earlier performance metrics, highlighting ongoing challenges for educators in maintaining academic integrity in a post-generative AI landscape.