This week
in 30 seconds
Five things worth knowing before your next department meeting.
A Brown economics professor suspects most of his class used AI on a take-home midterm after scores collapsed on the in-person final — the same week Brown's first generative-AI teaching report found 75% of surveyed faculty worried about AI-enabled cheating.
UChicago Law banned all electronic devices from first-year classrooms — notebook and pen only — as part of a new "AI-resilient pedagogy" strategy.
The largest AI-in-higher-ed survey yet — 45,398 respondents in 35 countries — finds student AI use near-universal while assessment guidance and faculty involvement lag badly.
Anthropic launched free Claude for Teachers with curricula mapped to standards in all 50 states — escalating the AI-company race for classrooms that will shape your incoming students.
A new randomized experiment finds AI can improve learning a week later — but only when students use it to explain concepts, not to generate text.
Main stories
The four developments most likely to reach your campus first.
Brown professor suspects most of his class used AI to cheat
Economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his first take-home midterm in nearly two decades; scores clustered suspiciously high. He moved the final in-person — and grades tanked. Serrano told Business Insider "the cost of cheating has basically gone down to zero," and shared details with Brown's standing committee on the academic code on July 8. The story went viral among academics, drawing 34,000+ upvotes on r/technology and a flood of instructors reporting the same take-home/in-person score gap.
The same week, Brown's Generative AI in Teaching and Learning committee published its inaugural report: three-quarters of 105 faculty respondents are concerned about AI-enabled cheating, yet the committee recommends de-emphasizing punishment and avoiding highly restrictive rules, with AI policy templates coming this summer. Worth noting: the score gap is suggestive, not proof — the final may simply have been harder, and the university investigation is ongoing.
Inside Higher Ed → Brown GAITL Report →If any of your spring assessments were take-home, this is the comparison your students — and your dean — will be making this fall. Consider running the Serrano test yourself: compare take-home and proctored score distributions before locking in your fall assessment mix.
UChicago Law bans all tech in first-year classrooms
"Students will be there with a notebook and a pen and taking notes," Dean Adam Chilton said. The new AI strategy frames the first year as a "crucial, formative period" where "the value of effortful struggle…is paramount" — while encouraging ethical AI use for 2Ls and 3Ls. Berkeley Law went stricter in May, barring AI from any credit-bearing work across all years. Stage-based AI policy is a template your curriculum committee could adapt.
Town & Country →Global survey: 88% of students use AI — institutions haven't caught up
The Digital Education Council's 2026 global survey (45,398 responses, 35 countries) finds 88% of students and 77% of faculty using AI. But 57% of students say assessments carry inadequate AI guidance, only 29% believe instructors are equipped to guide them, and just 31% of faculty feel meaningfully involved in shaping AI policy. The adoption question is settled; the syllabus-guidance question is not.
EdTech Innovation Hub →Anthropic launches free Claude for Teachers
Verified US K-12 educators who sign up by June 30, 2027 get a year of free premium Claude, with a teaching-skills library and curricula mapped to academic standards in all 50 states via a Learning Commons connector. Data terms are FERPA-aligned and co-developed with the American Federation of Teachers; teacher conversations aren't used for training. It joins OpenAI's ChatGPT for Teachers, Microsoft Elevate, and Google's Gemini push — and a formal pilot evaluation begins in Detroit Public Schools. For universities, the signal is clear: students arriving in 2027 will have been taught by AI-assisted teachers, and the same curriculum-aligned pitch is coming to higher ed.
Anthropic → Chalkbeat →Research & practice
What the studies say — and what colleagues are actually trying.
From the Research
How students use AI matters more than whether they use it
What was studied: In proctored sessions, undergraduates learned an unfamiliar topic and wrote an essay with or without generative AI, then took unaided assessments immediately and one week later (Contractor & Reyes).
What they found: Delayed learning gains appeared — but only for "augmentation" users who asked AI to explain concepts. "Automation" users who had AI generate text saw their gains vanish once AI was removed.
What you could do with this: Write assignment AI policies around the augmentation/automation distinction — permit explanation-seeking, prohibit text generation — rather than blanket allow/ban rules.
arXiv preprint →Giving teachers AI didn't help students — and dented motivation
What was studied: 193 teachers and 2,816 students across 14 Turkish schools; teachers randomly received an AI teaching-support tool, the tool plus usage nudges, or neither (Süngü, Lira Luttges & Duckworth).
What they found: Teacher AI access reduced student motivation and didn't improve average performance. The median teacher conversation was just two prompts — generating outputs, not refining them.
What you could do with this: If you use AI for course prep, iterate — critique and adapt outputs rather than pasting first drafts. Productivity gains elsewhere don't transfer automatically to teaching.
ETIH coverage →How Others Are Doing It
The exam where students try to break the AI
What they did: A data-mining final where 51 students each wrote 10 questions designed to make Claude, DeepSeek, and MiniMax fail. Every question had to relate to course material, have exactly one answer, and be solved by the student first. The harder the AI failed, the higher the grade.
What happened: Nearly every student made a model fail at least once, but only four fully defeated any model — and none broke Claude entirely. Finding weaknesses required knowing the subject more deeply than the machine.
What you could borrow: A "stump the AI" assessment flips the incentive — deep domain understanding becomes the only way to score well.
TMTPost →From traffic lights to two lanes
What they did: From 2026-27, Bath drops its traffic-light AI system for a principles-based "Two-Lane" approach (developed by the Association of Pacific Rim Universities): secure, supervised assessment in one lane; open AI-integrated work in the other.
What happened: It's part of a documented UK-wide shift — Cardiff, Durham, and Edinburgh Napier now require signed AI-use declarations with assessments, and several departments are reviving in-person exams (with notes allowed, not memory tests).
What you could borrow: The declaration statement is a 30-minute policy add; the two-lane framing tells you which assessments must be AI-proof and which shouldn't be.
Times Higher Education →Serrano said he'd still hire the student who scored consistently in person over the take-home ace. If employers start discounting grades from AI-era take-home work, what does our department's assessment mix signal about our graduates?
Only 29% of students in the DEC survey believe instructors are equipped to guide AI use. What would it take — training, examples, shared syllabus language — for our department to be in that 29%?
Quick hits & radar
Seven stories in under a minute, plus dates worth marking.
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1Are universities returning to in-person exams to combat AI cheating? Times Higher Education · July 9 · UK-wide shift documented
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2Analysts project a quarter of US private nonprofit campuses could close within a decade, partly on AI Washington Times · July 13 · Other scholars call it overblown
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3When AI detectors get it wrong: detector scores are predictions, not proof Gibson Kerr (UK education law) · July 13 · Legal exposure flagged
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4Universities must rethink AI education for the AI economy Center for Data Innovation · July 13 · Embed AI across disciplines
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5GitHub updates Copilot for Students: 200 monthly AI credits GitHub · Worth knowing before fall CS courses assume unlimited access
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6Ethan Mollick's "Twilight of the Chatbots": AI is shifting from chatbots to agents Forbes · July 14 · Downstream effects on assignments
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7Students from every state to help draft national AI policy at Boston fellowship Hawaii News Now · July 10 · Two students per state, 50 system leaders