Plotting of and by Students (leancrew.com)

An economics professor from Brown University raised concerns that many students in his class likely used AI tools to cheat on a take-home midterm, as evidenced by an unusual spike in grades. To assess students’ true understanding, he required an in-class final exam, where the performance dramatically dropped. This prompted the professor to disregard the midterm scores and weight the final exam as 80% of the course grade. The story highlights an increasing trend in educational settings regarding the integrity of assessments amidst the rise of AI/ML technologies. The article also included a unique visual representation of the exam scores, diverging from conventional graph formats—students' scores were shown vertically rather than horizontally. This sparked a discussion on data visualization principles and their implications for educational assessment. A subsequent plot created by the author with Python's Matplotlib restructured the data to a more traditional layout while enhancing clarity by color-coding to denote students who performed better in the midterm than the final. This incident reflects broader issues around AI's impact on academic integrity and the challenges faced by educators in adapting to new technologies.