Test Scores Plunge from 96% to 48% Without AI
The Decoder · rss · 2026-07-12
The Decoder reports on a classroom experience shared by an economics professor at Brown University. Suspecting heavy AI usage during a take-home exam where the class averaged a remarkable 96%, he switched the final to an in-person format. Consequently, 18 students dropped the class and 9 failed to attend, causing the class average to plummet to 48.6%.
The article references two large-scale studies from China and UC Berkeley that echo this observation:
- Students who relied more heavily on AI for assignments experienced a notable decline in proctored exam scores.
- This suggests that while AI can help complete coursework, it may also mask actual mastery of the material.
More from AGI Musings
- Anthropic's S-1 Shows $6.6M Revenue Per Employee as AI Agents Log 6x Human Hours — jacalulu · 2026-10-26
- Ben Recht: The world needs a truly open language model, and it's easier to build than you think — beenwrekt · 2026-10-26
- Which jobs fall to AI first? The rule: any layer whose rules can be written as code — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-26
- Anthropic S-1: expert-level AI 'within a few years', 90% of code written by Claude — kimmonismus · 2026-10-26
- The identity crisis in software engineering: multiagent systems demand a new problem set — rakyll · 2026-10-26
- Frontier LLMs negotiate contracts poorly and frequently renege for selfish gain, study finds — xuanalogue · 2026-10-26