Fields medallist Richard Borcherds stops grading homework for correctness at Berkeley because students use AI
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 26 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra178 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5117 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen208 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7147 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 117 days before it.
Key facts
- Course: MATH 250A, graduate abstract algebra, UC Berkeley (Hoodline, citing the Daily Californian)
- Change: homework credited for completion, not graded for correctness, after AI use produced uniformly high scores
- Borcherds: ‘not a very good system’; asked what to tell students considering his field: ‘I have no idea what to advise’
- GIGAZINE’s account (a translation of the interview) has him saying that ‘there will be nothing that human mathematicians can do that AI cannot do in a better way’ (wording not checked in the Daily Cal original)
- Reach: 235 points on Hacker News (Oct 25)
What happened
Richard Borcherds, who won the 1998 Fields Medal, said grading homework for correctness had become pointless now that AI can solve graduate algebra problem sets. The Daily Californian original returned an error when we tried to open it (HTTP 429); this entry uses Hoodline’s and GIGAZINE’s summaries of it.
Why it matters
A leading mathematician at a top department has stopped assessing take-home work, a concrete sign of how fast frontier models have made graduate-level maths homework solvable, in the same autumn in which models were credited with research-level results.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 3 press, 1 reaction
Press
- The Daily Californian: AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see ‘no point’ in grading homeworkdailycal.org, press
- Hoodline: Berkeley math professor stops grading homework amid student AI use (Oct 26)hoodline.com, press
- GIGAZINE: Fields Medal-winning professor stops grading homework for correctness (Oct 26)gigazine.net, press
Reactions
- Hacker News discussion (235 points)news.ycombinator.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed (Google News)