Liberal College Professor Gives Up Grading Homework After Catching On To Student Trend

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has completely given up on grading homework for accuracy, saying that rampant student use of artificial intelligence has made the exercise all but pointless.

Renowned mathematician Richard Borcherds told The California Post that so many students are relying on AI to complete regular homework assignments that those doing the work on their own are the ones being penalized.

“Student use of AI for homework is now widespread. 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,” Borcherds explained.

Borcherds said he now grades homework based solely on whether it was completed rather than whether the answers were correct, arguing that paying college-level instructors to grade AI-generated answers wastes time and money.

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Additionally, he said that it was becoming more and more difficult to weed out the AI-generated answers from the students’ work — primarily because the mistakes common to earlier AI tools are rapidly becoming fewer and farther between.

“There is no easy way to tell the difference between human and AI generated work. 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,” he said.

Online exams are also problematic, he said, adding that he has no way to determine which students are using AI tools to complete them. He has seen an overall improvement in the average grades from such exams.

The solution for him, thus far, has been to base the majority of his students’ grades on in-person exams where electronic devices are not permitted.

AI use is common among college students, according to a Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study, conducted online October 2-31, 2025. The survey found that more than half of U.S. college students use AI at least weekly to aid in their studies — and approximately 20% use it daily.

Male students are more likely to use AI than female students, and use is slightly more prevalent in business and technology-related fields than in the natural sciences and humanities.