A Fields Medalist stopped grading homework for correctness, and HN argued about who ever graded it
Berkeley's Richard Borcherds now gives credit for completion only. He says AI-assisted students were earning top scores anyway.
Borcherds told the Daily Californian the system is "not a very good system," but that he has no alternative for now. The thread's first move was to question what grading homework ever meant at a big research university.
Its second was to ask who pays for the graders.
What Borcherds changed
The Daily Californian reports that Berkeley's Fields Medal winner has stopped paying readers to check homework for correctness. Students get credit for turning it in. His reason is the scores: many students used AI to earn top marks. The story gives no statistics.
He is also pessimistic about the field. If AI keeps improving, he said, "there'll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can't do better," and about advising students to enter the department he said "I have no idea what to advise."
The campus context: Berkeley leaves AI policy to each instructor and says detectors like Turnitin are not reliable enough to standardize.
The thread opens with an objection to the premise
"He didn't grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade… most young students really don't care beyond that transaction." — a commenter who says course points turned homework into a transaction
Someone with institutional knowledge disagreed on the money.
"Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes… TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets." — a commenter describing how graders are funded at R1 universities
The case for a different course design
"One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework… It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question." — a commenter recalling a freshman math class
Another commenter, azaras, recalled Spanish public universities grading only the final, and said that continuous homework assessment left students worse prepared.
The pattern that emerges is not that homework died. Where it carried grade weight, AI broke it. Where it was practice, commenters argued it never needed a grade.
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