AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework

jruohonen

In-class exams, either written or oral. If you don't do homework, it is only on you. And with paper and pen, the next semester, yes.

iLoveOncall

Grading homework has never made sense anyway. Only grade work done in class. In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.

proc0

With some exceptions I think higher education should probably go back to being about academia and not necessarily teaching skills for industry. I think companies can now easily invest in their own extended training and grab people out of high school. Just a thought.

vhiremath4

This is quite sad. Even if students would cheat off each other, someone had to do the homework. And even the collaboration of cheating on homework always served as a forcing function for me or others to think about the material. If not actively, at least in the form of a quasi background radiation. With AI that is completely gone, and without reward loops for incremental work, the truth is there is a large number of people (especially 18-20 year olds) who will not do well on the exams because they need a bit of a stick. I am not saying this as a black and white statement. I just think there are different cohorts of students based on maturity and self motivation and we might be losing out on one cohort that is at neither extreme.

verdverm

Cue - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I had two classes like this, zero grades over the semester, they were among my favorite. Though we didn't really ponder what we were doing there and the means for final grades, for the admins, were both interesting (final test too long and hard, you already know what your grade is)

oldsklgdfth

> Borcherds said he currently grades on completion if a student hands in their homework. In high school (2006) my physics teacher gave credit for handing in the homework (he checked it and handed it back, but no grade was assigned). Didn't hand in homework, you got a zero. He knew then that if you assign grades to hw, people will cheat. If I'm paying for Berkeley, the professor have office hours for me to ask questions.

pessimizer

I never had a good math teacher in college that graded homework. The good ones told you which problems to do, and they told you that you'd be doomed on the exams if you didn't do them. They also only assigned the problems that had answers in the book. Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored. I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work. Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.

amelius

Can't we install AI on the student's phone, then let them work at home while the AI watches them, and then let the phone grade the student? "So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."

akmarinov

No worries ~10 more years and it won’t make sense to educate people past a certain point anyway It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.

AndrewKemendo

I never saw any point in grading work ever I went to Montessori school as a kid then I was in private school briefly till my parents went broke. Then I went to public school for the remainder of my career before I went to college and graduate school. I’ve taught at the graduate and undergraduate level and sat on academic boards for Purdue. Graded and ranked assignments do nothing other than act as a filter for the structural organization to determine who they want to give resources to The “educational” system has nothing to do with platonic or frankly any other thoughts of education for the polis Good riddance

bananaflag

I never graded homework or anything else except the final exam. In the lab I assist students with implementing and understanding code. Since they know they are not graded, there is no incentive for them to use AI. Sometimes we do try AI for the lulz but it makes as much sense as looking at the solutions (which I do provide already). As I frequently tell them, "AI can replace me teaching you, it cannot replace you understanding the material".

TrackerFF

When I studied, in Norway, we never got any marks or points for our homework. Our final grade was based 100% on our final exam (or mix of final exam + projects for the classes which had those), which was always a pen and paper type of exam. We did have mandatory homework we had to complete, in order take the final exam, but we never got any grades on those. Later on, when I became a TA, there were obvious signs of cheating in the homework, i.e. people handing in the same homework with the same step-by-step solution, with the exact same errors. In any case, cheating on homework wouldn't help their grade.

OgsyedIE

Part of the purpose of rigorous education is to make sure that students are competent for the academic labor force, but that's only half of the story. The other purpose is to preserve existing knowledge and prevent its loss to the force of entropy eating away at texts, files and neurons. If there's no preservation of knowledge in the academic form anymore we have no choice but to rely on AI, which has a massive downside: In the event that the cascading metal mining yield declines aren't solved by new tech and we do lose AI, we are now in the state that we will probably also lose calculus, liberalism and the ability to design a steam engine.

VyseofArcadia

At the lower undergrad level, there was already no point in grading homework a decade ago because Wolfram Alpha existed. At the graduate level maybe this problem is solved by doing Moore-style classes where the students present (on the chalkboard, not slides) and the professor critiques. Students could still have AI generate proofs and print them out or hand copy them, but maybe that's fine. Upper undergrad level is tricky, because students are expected to prove things, but maybe don't have the maturity for full-on Moore-style.

0x20cowboy

Maybe forcing them to turn in the homework hand written would help. They’d probably at least learn something by osmosis if they had to write down what the LLM spit out.

tzmake

Borcherds has been working with Epoch AI since at least 2024: https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-math-chat-1-thinking-smart... Now he issues the standard taking points about looms and horses and claims he could not have foreseen it? He is an AI shill, just like Tao.

peri-cl

On the flip side, AI's can now grade pure math problems with the accuracy and rigor of a postdoc. And unlike PhD tutors, they're universally accessible to all. It's the start of a golden age for those of us who are curious autodidacts. If you're working through the exercises of a math textbook, you can now instantly submit your (attempted) theorem-proof to the nearest robot, and see all your misconceptions and shortfalls of rigor laid bare.

DonHopkins

Brian Harvey, who taught CS 61A at Berkeley for decades (and wrote Berkeley Logo and Simply Scheme and Snap! and The Beauty and Joy of Computing), was making this argument long before AI. From "Using Computers for Educational Freedom": Brian> Students learn best through intrinsic motivation, not through force. What you learn under pressure doesn't last past the exam. Everyone says these things, and yet almost all teachers continue to give grades. Why? "It's required"; "The colleges need grades"; "The parents wouldn't stand for it"; "It's the way things are." In short, the reasons for grades are political. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/freedom.html At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School he built a computer course of self-paced units with no grades, and about 50 kids had keys to the computer center and used it evenings and weekends without adult supervision. In his Snap!Con 2025 talk for the ACM Karlstrom award he said why the no-grades part mattered: https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=1917 Jens> Okay. I've I've got one more question, Brian. Um, when you showed that picture of Sbury High of the Computer Lab users, computer center user Society Society, you very carefully and conscientiously mentioned every name with the title my friend, Jonathan, my friend. And that struck me as something uh that there might be a deeper message from you behind that. Brian> Yeah. Yeah. Um, everything conspires to make teachers the enemies of kids. Not because any teacher wants that, but because institutions have a lot of weight. And when you're giving somebody grades, you can't be their friend. It just doesn't work like that. You're not their friend, you're a hurdle they have to overcome. Brian> So yeah, it was really important to me that they let me not give grades and I think that made the whole thing possible and I couldn't have done it otherwise. And on AI in the same talk: https://youtu.be/pDK2PE_pkqQ?t=510 Brian> Mostly, people who talk about AI in education see it as a threat: kids will use it to cheat; or maybe AI will replace teachers so we won't have jobs anymore. Or sort of the best of these views is we don't know yet what skills kids are really going to need in an AI dominated world. Supposing that we have one. I'm pretty confident that AI won't replace teachers for rich kids -- and computers already replace teachers for poor kids, long before AI. The poor kids sit in front of computers that give them arithmetic problems. So it's not as if uh we're opening up a can of worms that's brand new. AI didn't create the problem with graded homework. It just made it impossible to keep pretending the grade measures the learning.

maxdo

this is what comes for education, the same way as agents can solve home work, they can grade, curate what you learn, what you work on etc. professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor). I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.

parsimo2010

The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice). Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it. So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution. You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.