Award-Winning Math Professor Quits Grading Homework Over ‘Widespread’ AI Usage: ‘No Easy Way to Tell’

A renowned mathematician and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has given up on grading at-home assignments, saying it only incentivizes students “to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty.”

“Student use of AI for homework is now widespread,” Richard Borcherds, who won the Fields Medal in 1998, lamented to the California Post in a story published Sunday, October 25.

Borcherds, 66, told the Post he currently gives credit based on whether students complete their assigned homework, rather than on the correctness of their answers, even while admitting it’s “not a very good system.”

The policy shift came as generative artificial intelligence continues to advance. “There is no easy way to tell the difference between human and AI generated work,” Borcherds explained. “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.”

For Borcherds, this is an issue that goes far beyond the classroom and could possibly impact the field in which he’s dedicated his life. In an interview published Friday, October 23, he told UC Berkeley’s student paper, The Daily Californian, that he wasn’t entirely sure he should encourage students to pursue math as a field anymore.

“If AI continues to improve at present rate, then, in a few years, there’ll be nothing human mathematicians can do that AI can’t do better,” he conceded. Borcherd’s comments came after OpenAI announced its AI agents had solved the 90-year-old Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, the student paper noted.

“I have no idea what to advise,” Borcherds admitted. “I even asked ChatGPT this exact question, and even ChatGPT said it didn’t have any idea what was going to happen.”

It’s a growing concern that’s been echoing across campuses throughout the nation, with Newsweek reporting more professors are turning to alternative ways to test students’ learning like oral examinations and in-person assessments.

In a May 2026 survey conducted by Cornell University, 37 percent of students said they used generative AI regularly for schoolwork, with much higher rates for computer science (62 percent) compared to students in the arts (24 percent). 26 percent of daily users admitted using it to cheat, compared to 7 percent of monthly users.

The Daily Californian reported that while UC Berkeley has tried different AI detection tools, like Turnitin and Rumi, they’ve yet to find one adequate enough to standardize on campus.