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

35 points romanhn 1 hour ago 50 comments

jruohonen 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ballmerpoint 1 hour ago | parent

> If you don't do homework, it is only on you.

The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences (EDIT: that is, doing poorly on the exam) are still in the future, but less so when they become present.

Then they lash out at the instructor, even if it’s really their fault.

10111001 1 hour ago | parent

>> 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.

> The issue with this policy is hyperbolic discounting — students are fine choosing not to do homework when the consequences are still in the future, but less so when they become present.

For me at least, in most of my classes, the homework was a tiny part of the grade. Just enough to maybe get over what you're talking about, but not enough to really matter.

dlx 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe it's changed, but when I went to Berkeley, it was really common that the homework counted for next to nothing and it was on you to do it since the majority of your grade (if not all) was on mid-terms and finals. No one really complained back then...maybe it's changed a lot, but if so, I'd say they should go back to their roots ;)

arm32 57 minutes ago | parent

This, it’s all exams. Homework is something to help students study, I guess not anymore.

imafish 54 minutes ago | parent

Homework assignments ungraded but mandatory.

Then an in-class oral exam on a random subject drawn at exam entry.

Works great in my country.

At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the student to study.

iugtmkbdfil834 51 minutes ago | parent

True. It was true when I was doing my classes and I have to imagine it did not get much better. And with math, there is very easy way to tell if you are anywhere close to understanding it.

rzerowan 48 minutes ago | parent

In high school math ,we usually had a stanupin the beginning of every lesson. Basically th entire class on their feet answering rapid fire questions from the teacher , usually some stuff that had been taught in the previous lesson. No calculator/notes just doing math in your head to get to sit down and start the class. Gnereally sucked when we were going through it , looking back though made digesting the material easier as you had to know, not just cram or hope for a calc or scrap paper to caluclate with.

So basically a oral pop quiz for math. i think could work well to complement homeworks by making sure the material as taught is actually inside the students heads.

iLoveOncall 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dofm 1 hour ago | parent

> Grading homework has never made sense anyway.

This is only true for subjects where there is only one answer to a question.

Plagiarism in other subjects tends to show itself. But AI has made plagiarism more viable in all sorts of fields.

iLoveOncall 1 hour ago | parent

How? Is a teacher unable to read an essay written in class?

I did all my studies in France, and every single grade was ALWAYS for work done in class, regardless of the subject.

boothby 1 hour ago | parent

I heartily disagree, grading hand-written homework serves as an early warning signal to students who don’t understand a concept* but want to. It’s also useful to keeners who like being told "you’re doing a good job, keep it up!" As well a warning to students who are so far behind that they can save time money and their GPA by dropping the class early.

And as a TA, I liked the income, and there’s a knock-on benefit that you’re learning to read with a critical eye which will help as a reviewer in the future.

* or in mine own obsolescent field, a measure of accuracy that indicates a student need think** longer before writing in the future

** I know, I know

Fantosism 56 minutes ago | parent

I recently attended a "flipped classroom" for an anatomy course. Lectures were recorded and done prior to class as (not-for-credit) homework, and the traditional homework was ungraded, done in groups in place of lecture. Labs were essentially just mini practicals with multiple stations.

I had never taken an anatomy course prior, and thought that the flipped classroom worked very well for the younger students. People who hadn't quite developed the knack for studying were now forced into preparing before class, and active recall was embedded into the lab practicals so that the cumulative exam wasn't testing things they'd memorized and forgotten.

For me personally, as a student, homework has only ever been for grade-padding.

noitpmeder 54 minutes ago | parent

Sure, so mark it up, just don't grade it or count its completion in a way such that it counts toward final rankings vs other students. Offer your TA's services to those who want to use it to improve, not to evaluate their AI's output.

proc0 1 hour ago | parent

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.

10111001 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

They'll probably just shut it all down.

With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway.

On research: If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.

ballmerpoint 1 hour ago | parent

> If some tech bro can't do the research in an afternoon with an agent, it's not worth doing at all, let alone worth paying a PhD for a tenured lifetime job to do.

The OpenAI math dump showed that it’s not worth paying hundreds of PhD-years if a tech bro can do it with an agent.

proc0 57 minutes ago | parent

The idea is AI is cheap enough and worth it for a company to invest in younger talent that will learn the specifics of the industry much faster. It doesn't have to be all or nothing, maybe university is reduced by 2 years or something.

rayiner 52 minutes ago | parent

> With AI, what's the ROI on educating the masses? Paying specialist academics to know things? Just leave them dumb and let save the rich some tax money. Dumb people are easier to control anyway

The generation of Americans that went to the moon had only 5-8% of people go to college. Whether someone is smart or dumb has little to do with formal higher education.

pasc1878 1 hour ago | parent

No that will not happen as the company has to pay and it shows in their accounts.

Much cheaper not to train anyone and let the state or pupil pay for training.

See lack of apprenticeships for a case of this.

rglullis 55 minutes ago | parent

It is the other way around. Education/Training is only expensive because it is subsidized by the State.

runarberg 20 minutes ago | parent

You neo-liberals have been wrong about this for 40 years now. You wrought us all with your Reaganomics, and have had the full attention of every government for this entire time (except maybe in Cuba) and the results have been truly disastrous, climate catastrophe and all.

If private enterprise was really this efficient, and government was really that inefficient, we should have seen ample evidence for that by now. The fact that we haven’t is proof that the promises of neo-liberalism are all lies.

whimsicalism 58 minutes ago | parent

it is too challenging today to capture the value of training your early employees, labor markets too liquid

davnicwil 53 minutes ago | parent

I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.

To the extent it is I agree it should obviously be replaced by on the job training, because that will be much much better. But to me this is what's happening now anyway, de facto.

Even you do, say, a computer science degree which is one of the more obviously industry aligned fields you're still not really learning how to build software products or even useful software at all really except in the most mechanical sense.

You're learning a bunch of variously useful theory (in the sense that it could all be useful in principle but you won't know exactly for what and at what time until you're out building things in the world) and no company is ever going to be incentivised to introduce you this in a proper environment conducive to intellectual exploration separate from 'the job', because frankly you'll be long long gone by the time any of it pays off often decades hence.

parineum 41 minutes ago | parent

> I don't understand where the premise comes from that higher education is doing this, or even has it as a goal.

They aren't the ones saying it. Parents, government officials and high school guidance counselors are telling everyone they need college to get a good job.

Colleges don't have to say anything thing about it but they raise their tuition abd accept the grant money while expanding their campuses to accommodate the rise in demand. That's exactly how a business would react to a growing market with rising demand and an influx of government money.

People pass through colleges on their way to getting a job and colleges oblige.

What op thinks colleges should be doing is accepting people who they think, with education, could contribute to the college's research fields. Think about the college tracks that lead to PhDs where the student stays with the university for some or all of their career. That's what OP is suggesting colleges become (or revert to, if that's what they ever were).

theoreticalmal 47 minutes ago | parent

Maybe AI will be yet another disincentivized for higher education. When I was considering law school a decade ago, the overwhelming advices from existing attorneys was “unless you’re in the top 10% of the top 10% of universities, you’re wasting your time getting a law degree”. Seems very similar to university today (at least in the USA)

vhiremath4 1 hour ago | parent

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.

azaras 53 minutes ago | parent

When I was young, public universities in Spain only evaluated the final exam. That was not a problem; it helped people become responsible. Nowadays, they have changed it to evaluate continuous homework, and students end up worse prepared.

vhiremath4 49 minutes ago | parent

Interesting. Honestly I think about this much more in a cohort way. There’s some cohort of students who are extremely self motivated and mature and understand the way you do one thing is kinda the way you do all things. There’s another cohort that is completely checked out or whose priorities are not grades at all. For these cohorts I don’t think it makes a big different.

But it’s hard for me to imagine that for the cohorts in between (who definitely want to be motivated) having some forcing function is just an easier guiding hand to helping them become responsible vs. completely bombing a class and then potentially losing hope or self identifying as lazy/helpless - which I had seen all too often to some of my smartest classmates.

Regardless not saying this to invalidate your experience. Just hasn’t lined up with mine.

viraptor 24 minutes ago | parent

Unfortunately the single final exam selects for lucky people. Did you learn the right thing? Are you healthy and well rested on the day? Can you perform under arbitrarily selected stressful conditions? Are your executive functions fine with that plan?

The responsibility part is just one element influencing the result.

HPsquared 50 minutes ago | parent

It should be social and other soft pressure to do homework, only the final exam should be graded.

Retr0id 49 minutes ago | parent

Even ignoring learning outcomes, answer sharing was a good excuse for the nerds to talk to the not-nerds.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

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)

pton_xd 1 hour ago | parent

I had a class like this, Discrete Mathematics, with no grades or assigned homework and just a graded midterm and final. It was easily my least favorite class; I didn't know where to spend my time and spent most of the semester wandering aimlessly through the material. The final was very difficult but open book (to help make up for the lack of structure in the course?) and ended up having a ridiculous curve.

Could have also just been a bad professor though.

verdverm 52 minutes ago | parent

These things are definitely down to the professor. Both of my cases were great teachers. My Calc 3 class was probably the worst, the prof always showed up 20m late, but he pulled the most funding in the department, so he did whatever he wanted.

Grades are a way for teacher and student to check their learning, but teaching still needs to happen regardless of checkpoints. Some subjects require practice, like pre-proof writing in math and many other introductory to intermediate level courses. This is where homework comes in handy.

For my set theory class, the professor still assigned problems, he just never collected or graded them. For my Data Sci 2 seminar, it was only seven of us and we did several presentations and a papers.

oldsklgdfth 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

HPsquared 48 minutes ago | parent

Cambridge engineering had something similar called "standard credit" for minor assignments. You'd get the full mark by default, only losing marks if missing or egregiously bad. The exam at the end of each year carried almost all of the grade. It meant you had to engage with the work, but didn't turn it into an exhausting competition for the best coursework grades.

pessimizer 1 hour ago | parent

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 56 minutes ago | parent

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."

iugtmkbdfil834 52 minutes ago | parent

^^;

I have a solution, but I don't think people will appreciate it, because:

1) it is very analog 2) requires work from both student and teacher 3) there is no AI in it 4) there is not money to made on it 5) all of the above

In short, do what my MBA class did. At home you study the examples, the how behind it and possible solutions. In class, you may be called in front of the class to show that you know what you are doing.

Is it hard? Yeah, but it is kinda the point.

akmarinov 51 minutes ago | parent

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 51 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

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 46 minutes ago | parent

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 42 minutes ago | parent

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 34 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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":

>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.