HN user
In Serrano's class and other introductory classes like it, cheating has been widespread before AI and after. The truth is that the social stigma around cheating has gone away (perhaps this is only a post-remote-schooling phenomena) so cheating is trivial. All you have to do is go text a friend in the class (most people will have many friends in any large intro class they're taking).
Source: am student @ Brown
I would not agree with this from my own experience. The truth is the culture, at least at Brown in the 2020s, has little stigma around cheating in big classes. Unclear how different this is in the past, but a friend and I often joke that the student body is very good at reward hacking. If there's a reward, people will find a way to get it! That's across grades (people will cheat), housing (a huge % people will competitively apply for specialty housing or accommodations to beat the lottery), and a whole lot of other things. I don't think this is correlated with legacy, athletics, ect. but an artifact of the current culture unfortunately.
Not quite true. As a student who had many friends in Serrano's class in question among others at Brown, I'm be quite doubtful that AI has led to an increase in this particular class. The truth is that (at least post-covid) cheating is very widespread on take-home exams. If you are taking an introductory class such as Serrano's, you will have many friends in the class and cheating is so widely accepted that there is little to no stigma to doing it and so many people do. The primary limiting factor on whether a student cheats is not access or ease but desire.
It's a sad state of affairs.