Hand Wringing Over AI Cheating at Brown

- 5 minutes read - 1009 words

There’s a particular flavor of joy that comes from watching a golden child get caught cheating, and it’s very specifically a Jim McAllister flavor of sour grapes. Watch Election (1999) again and you’ll remember him: the put-upon high school teacher, ground down by two decades of unglamorous work, watching Tracy Flick work the cursus honorum toward a noteworthy college, an ascendant career at an investment bank, thence to Congress, thence the White House.

Nothing will stop her, of course. Nothing at all. And don’t we hate that? 1

Most of us never got that acceptance letter. Most of us won’t get the corner office, the golden ticket, the shield against outrageous fortune that we were promised. So when the Tracy Flicks of the world get caught cheating their way through the one gate that was supposed to challenge them like the rest of us normos, we can feel the distinct juicing of schadenfreude out of the corpus mcallisterensis.

On top of that, in this enshittified world where these propeller-hat people (e.g. Google) make shitty products (e.g. Meta) that promote degradation of our society while always asking “Can we?” but never “Should we?” it can feel a little like divine retribution to see the rotted venture establishment, the rotted governmental forebears, and the wearers of false mock turtlenecks humbled.

Recently, it was revealed that a professor at Brown in an advanced economics class gave his students his customary take-home exam. When the exams came in, the class average was much higher than historical trends. So the professor flagged the anomaly and announced an in-person test: if the results held up, the take-home would still count toward the grade; if they proved anomalous, he’d disregard the take-home, and the in-person exam alone would determine the grade. At this point, many, many, many students dropped the class. Many, many others got zeros on the in-class exam. And in general, the class average slipped back toward the historical mean.

Except remember how Election actually ends. McAllister doesn’t get vindicated. He rigs the vote out of pure spite, torches his own career doing it, and Tracy wins anyway. The schadenfreude was never about justice. It was about him needing someone else’s success to be illegitimate so his own mediocrity would make sense. I’m not sure we’re doing anything different, standing here rooting for a bunch of nineteen-year-olds to get caught.

Source: Emma Whitford, “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” Inside Higher Ed, July 08, 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat

With both of these versions of the narrative running through my head, I listened to El, from The House of El, on YouTube, who describes herself as of Russian extraction and a computer science PhD. Some of her content is clearly designed to placate the algorithm and maximize engagement, but there’s always a grain of truth even in situations like that. She points out that this test, as structured, isn’t really fit for the purpose of professional action in our current time. We’re not really measured on the capability of producing facts from memory, but on the application of facts and models we’re aware of and can reference instantaneously at any time. Based on my own experience in engineering education, that’s exactly right. We’d be delusional to think LLMs can’t draw on everything they’ve ingested from the art and science of computer programming — Knuth included — to produce a better, more representative implementation of any algorithm in any language on earth. Why the fuck is it worth a would-be hire’s time to demonstrate they can do that? It’s not what they’re going to do on the job, and it’s not actually required. So what’s the point? Referring this back to the Brown case, she basically asks the same thing: what’s the point of this test? With this in mind, I became much more sympathetic to the Brown students’ plight, and I started to think about why they’d do this, especially when they’re throwing away the unique gift of an Ivy League education.

But sympathy isn’t the same as a verdict on who’s really at fault. I don’t think Ivy pedigree makes anyone uniquely rotten, cheating notwithstanding. What Brown actually shows is that the credential never delivered the immunity it promised. The same existential and employment angst that’s been chewing through the unwashed masses for years has finally worked its way up the food chain and started biting into the Tracy Flicks too. McAllister spent the whole movie assuming Tracy’s certificates and gold stars would always put her somewhere he couldn’t touch. They didn’t. And the fear she’s running from now — that none of it will actually be enough — turns out to be exactly the fear the rest of us have been sitting with the whole time.

Here’s the part that should really land it: the dream job for an Ivy-pedigreed computer science graduate used to be Meta. Now Meta is reportedly using its own surveillance tooling to monitor those same graduates — instrumenting their every keystroke and ticket — and grading them against the results like they’d just stepped off the boat onto a turn-of-the-century Triangle Shirtwaist garment floor. The prestige an Ivy League degree was supposed to buy has been quietly repriced to zero. To the people who own the machines, a Harvard CS grad and a line worker are the same input: grist for the profit mill, measured, timed, and squeezed for margin.

That’s the actual point, and it’s not a schadenfreude point. It’s a workers-of-the-world unite point. The credential divide was never anything but a tool the ownership class uses to keep the rest of us from noticing we’re all being extracted from the same way. Elon Musk just crossed a trillion dollars in personal net worth. Whatever’s happening to Ivy League CS grads at Meta, and to Brown econ students cribbing off an LLM, it’s happening underneath that number. What are we doing?

Footnotes

  1. The movie plays brilliantly with oversexualization of children. Do we hate Tracy because of misogyny? Misplaced oversexualization (And isn’t that the same?)