A UC Berkeley professor has stopped grading students’ homework for correctness after noticing artificial intelligence tools were helping them rack up top marks.
Richard Borcherds, a renowned mathematician who received the prestigious Fields Medal in 1998, said widespread student use of AI has undermined the value of traditional homework grading.
“Student use of AI for homework is now widespread,” Borcherds told The California Post. “Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty.”
Paying graders to evaluate AI generated answers is also a waste of time and money, he said.
Borcherds now awards credit based primarily on whether students complete their assignments rather than whether their answers are correct, acknowledging that he does not know of a better solution.
he professor said it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish work produced by artificial intelligence from work written by students themselves.
“There is no easy way to tell the difference between human and AI generated work,” he told The California Post. “Occasionally one could tell it is AI because AI made a few characteristic errors, but AI has now improved so much that it rarely makes obvious mistakes.”
His comments come as AI tools grow increasingly capable of tackling complex academic problems, raising questions about how universities will assess students’ work and prepare the next generation of mathematicians.
Borcherds’ concerns about the future of mathematics were also highlighted in an interview with the Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s student newspaper.
“If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better,” Borcherds told the paper.
Borcherds suggested universities might not immediately adapt to rapid advances in AI, pointing to the resistance to change that often characterizes academic institutions.