Plotting of and by students

I saw this article at Inside Higher Ed this morning, guided by a Mastodon post from Techmeme. The title of the article is “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” so if you’re sick to death of reading about AI—pro, con, or caveated—don’t feel obligated to follow the link. I’m interested in a plot included in the article more than the article itself. An economics professor gave his class a take-home midterm, and the grades on it were much higher than usual. He suspected the high marks came from the students using LLMs to answer the questions, so the final exam was done in class and the marks were generally much lower. Here’s the plot given in the article: Image from Inside Higher Ed. Let me start by saying I have no criticisms of the plot, just some comments about things that struck me. First, the upper portion of the chart made me think the students, S1 through S59, were ordered according to their score on the final exam (the gray dots and figures). But as…