--- title: AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no... description: UC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist, no longer grades homework for correctness and now only grades on completion. He made the... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-use-leads-uc-berkeley-math-professor-to-see-no-point-in-grading-homework-hlghtulxh twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework | daily.dev og:description: UC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist, no longer grades homework for correctness and now only grades on completion. He made the... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/ai-use-leads-uc-berkeley-math-professor-to-see-no-point-in-grading-homework-hlghtulxh og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/HLGhtuLxH.png og:image:alt: AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 6 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary UC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist, no longer grades homework for correctness and now only grades on completion. He made the change after seeing many students use AI to consistently score top marks, calling grading for correctness pointless since AI use is now unavoidable. Borcherds revealed this in an interview following OpenAI's announcement that AI agents apparently solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. Borcherds said that if AI keeps improving at its current rate, within a few years there will be nothing human mathematicians can do better than AI, and he no longer knows how to advise students on entering the field. Campus has tried AI detection tools like Turnitin and Rumi but determined they are not adequate enough to be standardized on campus. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did a UC Berkeley math professor stop grading homework for correctness? Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist at UC Berkeley, stopped grading homework for correctness because so many students used AI to consistently get top scores that he saw no point in paying readers to grade it. He now grades only on completion, which he admits is 'not a very good system' but says he has no alternative at the moment. _Anyone rethinking how coursework gets evaluated amid AI use can follow the debate on daily.dev._ ### What AI detection tools has UC Berkeley tried for catching AI use in student work? UC Berkeley has tried AI detection tools including Turnitin and Rumi, but determined they aren't adequate enough to be standardized across campus. AI policy is instead left to individual faculty discretion, with the campus's AI Hub offering sample AI use statements for professors to adapt in their syllabi. _Readers weighing AI detection tools for their own classrooms or teams can track this discussion on daily.dev._ ### Did OpenAI's AI solve the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem? OpenAI announced that AI agents apparently solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of mathematics' most difficult unsolved problems. This announcement prompted UC Berkeley professor Richard Borcherds to say that if AI keeps improving at its current rate, within a few years there will be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better. _Developers tracking how fast AI is encroaching on expert domains can follow updates like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 184 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-25). **TL;DR:** Discussion centers less on the AI-cheating problem itself and more on who actually grades homework and whether homework ever mattered, with many arguing exams-only grading (common historically) is the obvious fix, while others worry this abandons struggling students and signals deeper dysfunction in higher ed. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 35% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - Switching to completion-only or exam-only grading removes the incentive to cheat and was already common practice at some universities before AI. - Preparing (even unused) cheat sheets or doing homework without grading pressure can still reinforce learning through self-directed engagement. - Some see this as an opportunity to return to a less transactional, more self-directed model of education with office hours and intrinsic motivation. **The pushback** - Pointed out that the professor likely never personally graded homework anyway, since TAs/graders handle that work, making the framing somewhat ironic. - Removing graded homework removes an early-intervention mechanism that helps struggling students get back on track before failing a final. - Relying solely on proctored exams disadvantages students for reasons unrelated to understanding, like being unwell or having bad luck on exam day. - Concern that students who need homework as a 'stick' for motivation will simply fail at the high-stakes final with no chance to recover. - Broader skepticism that higher education's value proposition (jobs, social capital, even research) is collapsing or already somewhat illusory in the AI era. **By community** - hackernews (heated): A long, sprawling argument split between debating the mechanics of who really grades homework and TA funding, and a much larger meta-debate over the future value of homework, exams, and higher education itself in an AI era. **Hottest debate:** Whether grading should shift entirely to proctored exams versus continuing some form of homework-based assessment, given concerns about luck/stress in exams versus AI-enabled cheating in homework. **Open questions** - How well do exam scores actually correlate with later-life or career success compared to homework-based assessment? - What new assessment structure can replace homework grading without being easily defeated by AI while still supporting struggling students? - Will AI disruption cause a wave of institutional closures, particularly among lower-tier universities, and how fast? **Highlights** > 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. > — [parsimo2010 on hackernews · 11 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234369) > >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). Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade. > — [jhbadger on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234508) > 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. > — [vhiremath4 on hackernews · 6 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50233448) > The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra. > — [InsidiousWombat on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50234977) > If the value of higher education is purely book learning, sure. But if the value is signaling and the creation of ingroups that will become future elites, they can be valuable even if you do not learn a thing in class. It's a debate about elite higher education that has been going on for decades, as top institutions refuse to grow their class sizes, even as they could find 4x the students that would fit qualifications. > — [hibikir on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50235123) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50233304) · 98 points · 184 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Andrej Karpathy on X: "A number of people are talking about implications of AI to schools. I spoke about some of my thoughts to a school board earlier, some highlights: 1. You will never be able to de](https://daily.dev/posts/andrej-karpathy-on-x-a-number-of-people-are-talking-about-implications-of-ai-to-schools-i-spoke-a-2h1ugjcwh) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [AI cheating tools are winning. Detection isn't the point.](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-cheating-tools-are-winning-detection-isn-t-the-point--s82rj0lhb) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#openai](https://daily.dev/tags/openai), [#chatgpt](https://daily.dev/tags/chatgpt) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/ai-use-leads-uc-berkeley-math-professor-to-see-no-point-in-grading-homework-hlghtulxh) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-use-leads-uc-berkeley-math-professor-to-see-no-point-in-grading-homework-hlghtulxh","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/ai-use-leads-uc-berkeley-math-professor-to-see-no-point-in-grading-homework-hlghtulxh"},"datePublished":"2026-10-25T18:38:01.683Z","dateModified":"2026-10-25T19:54:32.594Z","description":"UC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, a Fields medalist, no longer grades homework for correctness and now only grades on completion. 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