UC Berkeley prof who quit grading students homework deploys new tactic to catch out cheaters: Waste of time

A renowned UC Berkeley mathematician who stopped grading homework for correctness because of rampant AI use has revealed he is now using in-person exams with no electronic devices allowed to judge how well his students are doing.Richard Borcherds, who won the prestigious Fields Medal in 1998, said he has no better solution as artificial intelligence makes it nearly impossible to tell class submissions from a chatbot’s.“I now base grades mainly on in-person exams with no electronic devices allowed,” Borcherds told The California Post.“Online exams are now a waste of time as several students just use AI to answer the questions.I cannot tell which students are using AI, but I notice the average score increases a lot in online exams.” The biggest news, opinion and culture shaping California right now.

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Never miss a story Research backs up what the professor has seen in his own classroom.A 2024 study published in the journal Discover Education by Alexander Stanoyevitch analyzed years of exam scores from an introductory statistics course he teaches every semester, before and after ChatGPT arrived.It found that scores rose significantly when exams of similar difficulty moved from in-person to online.A separate study published in the journal Teaching of Psychology compared two sections of an undergraduate personality psychology course.

In one, 153 students took the final exam in person.In the other, 160 students took it online without monitoring.

The online group scored significantly higher.Whether the exam was online or in person predicted students’ final scores better than how they had done earlier in the course.The researchers concluded that unmonitored online exams inflate scores and may not reflect students’ true abilities.Borcherds said telling human work from AI-generated work has become increasingly...