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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine

He has a youtube channel with lectures in number theory, category theory and other things.

Grading homework is a measure of conscientiousness and perhaps a pedagogical tool to force learning but by college perhaps we should have moved out of the need for the latter.

One can simply measure conscientiousness through attendance grade and mastery through exam grade and then we have two grades the universities can certify students for that are no longer dimension reduced into a single number.

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.

He should perhaps ask students if they want it marked and if they do still provide feedback, but be clear it won’t count for grades as cheating is too easy.

Lazy students will do no work all year then fail. Clever motivated students will continue to do well.

More people will fail till they realise they need to do the work, but that’s just the way it is, it’s the only way to be sure (along with vivas) that students know the subject.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

It would give a more accurate impression of the kids understanding, incentive understanding it, be more pleasant interaction for all involved and build the kid up to Vivas and interviews.

Give homework, have TAs go over it with students, have a final, which is the only thing graded.

Classes are for bringing you toward mastery, isn't it? You should pass based on mastery, not effort. I don't give a shit if my pilot tries really hard to fly. I care if he successfully flies.

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.

"So you thought AI was a gift from heaven? Ha, it's your worst nightmare! Let this be a lesson."

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.

In-class exams are anyway a proxy for grading homeworks, because those who don't do them will get lower grades.

- There's the paternalistic argument that the adults we send to college aren't real adults and need carrots and sticks to learn properly. Making homework part of the grade helps them help themselves. This is a value judgement on what's more important (squeezing knowledge into people at any cost vs giving people agency and accountability), but I have suggestions as to exactly where people can stuff that argument. IMO, letting fully fledged adults limp through the system without the motivation or wherewithal to do a little hard work in their own self interest isn't doing them any favours.

- On the credentialing side of things, ongoing grading from something like homework helps smooth over the effects of a bad day of sleep or test anxiety. I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I think there are tools which are more accurate and less work for the students and the teachers. Start the semester with an ungraded (corrected if students want to take advantage of it, but not affecting their final grade) take-home test of the background knowledge expected for the course. This lets students decide if they're ready or should take an earlier course instead, do some selected reading on weak points during an otherwise relatively light workload in the semester, and learn the teacher's testing and grading style so that there's less anxiety leading up to a real test. Your grade in the course reflects your best demonstrated mastery on the final, which is arguably closer to what people expect from the credentialing aspect of things; nobody cares how well you executed epsilon-delta proofs during the week you studied them, they care whether you're ready for the next course or ultimate job using that skill. Allow a makeup/retake exam (new questions), maybe two, and take the maximum score. To the extent that your test has any noise, this inflates the overall score, but it mitigates the effect of a single bad day, anxiety, etc, and gives you an easy framework for handling legitimate life events. Still assign homework. Still correct it for students who want feedback. Don't let it influence the grade.

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.

It’ll be like you’re studying under Aristotle while AI is doing cold fusion next to you - incomprehensible on any level.

professors needs to be life coaches and motivators, less of a oral/written book reproducer. That part will be automated. Evals also will be in a locked room, do you home work, bi-weekly do the check, correct with agent what needs to be repeated. Measure if you on course/off course doing better/worse. If you are not doing good, escalate to your coach(professor).

I mean, sure, charisma can engage people into several classes, but also, lets be honest what % of professors really got charisma? If it helps lectures are great, the active work should be done with agents, individually and in the team. of human, and other peoples agents. That's the future of work.

Example: If you want to learn to do something with your hands, it normally needs to be taught in person, so you can try to do it, fail, the teacher tells you what you did wrong, shows you how, you do it again and it works. But this can now almost entirely be done with AI. A YouTube video shows you how. You practice it on camera. An AI watches the video, tells you where you went wrong, and shows you specific clips to improve. You do it again until you get it right.

The piece of paper you get from a University doesn't need to come from "A University". Any organization that can give you a test in person can see whether you do the thing right or not and give you a certification if you do.

So really all we need now is an AI Khan Academy and independent testing/certification.

Assume they use AI and grade them based on where they can take it form there.

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)

Brian> 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.

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