A University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) professor has stopped giving his students graded homework, saying that rampant AI use has made it pointless. According to the New York Post, renowned mathematician Richard Borcherds said that it’s now nearly impossible to tell the difference between a student-written submission and one that’s been created using artificial intelligence. Because of this, he now primarily uses in-person exams with no electronic devices to grade his students and see how well they are doing in his class.

“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,” Borcherds told the publication. He also added, “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. And paying to grade AI generated answers is a waste of time and money.”

This problem appeared when OpenAI released the first popular LLM, GPT-3.5, in November 2022. But while LLMs were prone to mistakes back then, making their inordinate use easy to spot, the technology has improved to the point that it’s now very hard to tell if it's been used for written work.

Various researchers have proven that students routinely get better scores when taking exams online. While they haven’t definitively proven that the students used AI to answer the questions, the difference between the scores was significant enough that the researchers concluded unmonitored online exams are no longer reflective of what the students have learned in the course.

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