Hand Wringing Over AI Cheating at Brown

- 5 minutes read - 1028 words

There’s a particular flavor of joy that comes from watching a golden child get caught failing, and it’s very specifically a Jim McAllister, from Election (1999) flavor of sour grapes. You’ll remember McAllister: 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

Recently, it was revealed that a professor at Brown in an advanced economics class gave his students a take-home exam. When the exams came in, the class average was much (coordination problems are a bitch) 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.

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

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. Instead in the widening maw of income inequality we’ll look helplessly as stability soars out of grasp.

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 in our brains’ bitterness cortex.

On top of that, these so-called purportedly golden-brained children are the same genus who “conned” us into this enshittified world. They’re the propeller-hat people (e.g. Google) who Don’t Be Evil until that got in the way of profits. They’re the coterie that makes shitty products (e.g. Meta) that promote degradation of our society. It feels a little like divine retribution or divine revelation: In a world where we can’t fight Meta or Alphabet, we get to see the feet of clay of their staff: craven, high on their own supply, and cheating.

Sneer when you read that. Most of us are.

But, on the other hand, what if we are in a world where the memorization of facts just isn’t that useful. Honestly, I think that’s true at the same time. Once knowing facts was a proxy for rich mental models and understanding i.e. someone you want to hire. I’m not sure that proxy signal is valid anymore.

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 in possession of a computer science PhD.

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. So why are we interviewing folks to do exactly that? I suspect we know it’s bunk but we’re still doing the ritual because we can’t accept that the foundation has shifted out from under us that quickly.

Perhaps it’s only by holding the two threads in mind that the very interesting thing emerges: Why were they cheating? The professor reports that rumor had that his class with his cheat-able test was a great way to pad GPAs. Why that, though? Follow the chain and we see the naked fact: The so-called genius class was counting on their genius (be it mythical or otherwise) to provide armor against that slavering maw of inequality I mentioned earlier. You see, budgeting for eggs was not for them — their knowledge of Java and Scheme meant they would be casually brunching, not like the rubes in the flyover states.

To wit: 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. To put class anxiety sting on it: They’re treating CS kids like Amazon delivery folks — that was meant for them not us.

What this story reveals is that 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 Flick / non-inherited wealth class. 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 Tracy was running from — that she’d be stuck living an uneducated life in modest means — has proved to be shockingly robust.

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 plutocrats use to keep the rest of us from noticing we’re all being extracted from the same way.

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?)