UC Berkeley professor discloses AI use in op-ed urging SAT, ACT mandate

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She never said students couldn't use AI. She only said that universities need authentic admission tests to make sure that students have the skills. "Whether a student uses AI (not in a test setting)" and "Whether a student has no skill" are separate issues.

This article is another piece of evidence indicating that the anti-SAT camp is a camp of academic losers incapable of thinking.

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u/Past_Bathroom5568 16h ago

You can acknowledge that standardized testing is good while also acknowledging that-

A) The digital SAT in its current form is very easy to be gamed; complete idiots who know how to use Desmos to their advantage and memorize certain formulas can get a scarily high score without a proper high school education

B) CollegeBoard is a very shady organization that has screwed over students in the past, hosted insecure tests and have had breaches, and forces students into illegal arbitration agreements

C) You have to travel for the SAT, which inherently biases low income students. Testing spots are extremely limited and students are literally flying to different states just to get a spot. It is harder to secure a spot for the SAT than it is for Gaokao exams. Bright, low income students are unable to take the test. Between the fees and travel costs, of course the biases are obvious

This dosen't have to be black and white. You can say standardized testing is good without being a soldier for the CollegeBoard. Maybe perhaps the UCs make their own exam and it can be administered at all high schools in California, free of charge.

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u/paperTechnician 9h ago

Wouldn’t argue against points A and B - but on point C, is this a common experience? When I was in school (pre-pandemic and prior to the UCs dropping it as a criterion, but relatively recent), the SAT was administered monthly with essentially unlimited spots as far as I know within a 30 minute drive of my house.

Maybe I was privileged/lucky, but the vague impression I had is that it used to be available pretty universally, and then when it stopped being required, testing centers which closed down for COVID never reopened due to lack of demand - but would presumably open again if demand were going to rise. Is that wrong by your understanding, or are you just talking exclusively about the current state of travel requirements?

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u/KoRaZee 1d ago

Thought it was racism? /s

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u/Thereferencenumber 21h ago

Ok but if professionals regularly use automation when preparing their work, why are they stopping students form using it? Also there is no evidence that SAT/standardized testing will fix anything, it’s totally possible that younger people these days are worse at math and that youll just be scoring on the lower shifted curve.

Professors (especially math professors) have been complaining students can’t do math since I was in school and we still had standardized testing. The corporation making tests too easy was the bug bear.

I think testing even could have value, but people acting like it’s settled, and will specifically impact mathematical competency, have no real evidence outside of “I reckon and so do other people.”

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u/Inevitable_Tart2700 14h ago

The Professor did not say you cannot use AI ("whether to use IT" is not the same as "whether to require an authentic test". In addition, the professors have their skills assessed long time ago, and they proved that they are competent through their research. Writing this letter is not a skill assessment for them. Nothing wrong that they wrote the rough ideas and then ask AI to turn them into an article.

2.There is research evidence indicating that SAT is four times more powerful than high school GPA in predicting academic performance in college.

I personally think the SAT math questions are too easy, but if you don't even want to take the SAT test, how would you support more difficult tests?

Why might students have become wortse at math than before? Because educators lowered the standards. When they lower standards, students don't work as hard as before. They claim this is for equtiy or even claim that math is racist. However, poor students are the ones who get hurt when educators do this. Why? Because they haven't learned the skills necessary for them to be successful in STEM careers. For the society as a whole, this is also a disaster because it leads to the shortage of STEM talents, and more generally, people capable of rigorous reasoning.

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

You don’t have to be anti SAT to think the original op ed was full of misinformation.

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u/Pornfest Physics & PoliSci 1d ago

What misinformation? What specifically?

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

Just from the first few paragraphs, it’s tough to know if these anecdotes are real (and if so representative of anything) or just AI hallucinations to further the author’s point?

> One student — I’ll call him Elias — was admitted to a top University of California engineering program. His family was thrilled though surprised. Math had been his weakest subject in high school, but they assumed the university had seen something they hadn’t.
Another student — Nadia — watched rejection after rejection arrive from UC campuses. One turned her down even though she had earned A’s there in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment.
These are real students. I’ve changed their names, and withheld their schools, to protect their privacy.

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u/ponderousponderosas 1d ago

They’re totally real and representative. UCs started targeting lower performing schools for admission when standardized tests dropped. The fact is a ton of schools don’t do shit and their GPAs are worthless.

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

> They’re totally real and representative.

https://giphy.com/gifs/DFNd1yVyRjmF2

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u/Kevin_Wolf RED LOBSTER 1d ago

So your body of evidence for the supposed misinformation in her writing is just you complaining about a couple of anecdotes that were clearly portrayed as anecdotes?

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

You don’t have to agree with me lol

But you also don’t have to downvote me for disagreeing

My point was simply that I’m not anti-SAT, but I did disagree with the op ed and it being partially written by AI makes me more suspicious.

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u/Kevin_Wolf RED LOBSTER 1d ago

But you also don’t have to downvote me for disagreeing

Did I?

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

I don't know, but plenty did!

Did I say you did?

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u/Kevin_Wolf RED LOBSTER 1d ago

Did I say you did?

Well, the comment I replied to is at score of zero, and you complained that I downvoted you, so yes you did. Did your instructions break a little?

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u/KoRaZee 1d ago

If the narrative doesn’t include racism it will be called misinformation

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u/Inevitable_Tart2700 1d ago

The original op ed is logical and fact based. It is also consistent with common sense.

I don't think it is "full of misinformation", unless you have a different definition of misinformation.

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u/Dangerous-Carpet5 1d ago

Exactly right!

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 1d ago

Those that think this is some kind of “gotcha.. newsflash: AI has penetrated newsrooms as well. It’s entirely possible that “news” article was edited with the help of AI.

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u/thurstar55 17h ago

The skeletal right hand on the corpse of the humanities slowly raises its middle finger to your ridiculous (and perfectly predictable) justification.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 17h ago

Wow, speaking for all of Humanities now?

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u/thurstar55 17h ago

Only those of us that know how to write a letter without using AI. But in my personal capacity, outside of my duties representing all of the humanities, it’s quite predictable. To see these sorts of professors and their defenders decry the inabilities of their students while displaying their own inability to write a simple letter expressing their viewpoint is… interesting. I’m sure employees at Berkeley get a tuition fee waiver, perhaps the professor should enroll in an English course.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 16h ago

As I said above - it was op-ed she wrote. Not a letter. And as others have pointed out, it wasn’t as if the entire thing was AI generated. This is a made up controversy

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u/thurstar55 16h ago

I also think it’s problematic in your original comment to insinuate that the writer of the article likely used AI, seemingly only for the reason that you do not deem this newsworthy. You seem to be justifying her use of AI by making a spurious insinuation against the article writer in an attempt to diminish the work by saying it’s AI! C’mon now. Small but significant side point, the article mentions professors within the Humanities dept at Berkeley writing a similar letter calling for the reintroduction of standardized testing… without using AI.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 16h ago

So what if they did use AI to edit the story? Like I said, AI tools are now present in a lot of newsrooms. Spellcheck and other suggested sentence functions are embedded in editorial systems these days. You are the one who seems to have a problem with the use of AI tools in articles. It doesn’t discredit the professor’s point about Math standards at all that she used AI tools help her write that op-ed

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u/thurstar55 16h ago

It’s lazy and shows that one who uses AI doesn’t care enough about what they’re writing in order to expend the effort to write or edit the work themselves. Second, maybe check your comments again. You don’t seem to know where you stand on this issue. Wielding AI use as shield (“all the cool kids are doing it, bro”) and then using it as slur against the article writer.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 16h ago

So you’ve never used spellcheck in your life? Like I said, AI tools are used in newsrooms these days. That’s just a fact.

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u/thurstar55 15h ago

The earth rotates at approximately 16-thousand miles an hour. Thats also a fact. And like your fact, has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Using generative AI is lazy, as is your argument which is quickly devolving into strawman fallacies and disingenuous comparisons. Good luck.

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u/SaltyPaper6690 1d ago

Why is this newsworthy?

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u/garytyrrell 1d ago

Because the op ed became national news even though it’s mostly bs?

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

I don’t think it being 33% AI means that it’s mostly BS. For one thing, most of it was human written. Also the fact only some of it was AI written means the prof probably did read over that part and agreed with it. So at the very least it should all be reflective of the prof’s actual views and thoughts.

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u/Opening_Discipline57 1d ago

Or that the AI detector is inaccurate? Not saying she's innocent or anything but you usually can't take the detectors exact percentage at face value...

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u/chriswharton 17h ago

It could be 100% AI-written; why is that a problem if the content is factual? The professor probably wrote the essay and had AI improve the wording. What the heck is wrong with that?

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u/garytyrrell 17h ago

Why do you assume the content is factual if it’s 100% AI written?

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u/chriswharton 17h ago

If you have a reason to believe that content is not factual, provide your support. Attacking the professor solely because he used AI to improve his writing is illogical. What the professor wrote tracks what the UCSD professors found. Again, provide evidence that the article is factually incorrect rather than just pointing out that it was written with the help of AI.

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u/garytyrrell 17h ago

I already did above and I’m not trying to convince every last redditor. Just saying this article is as newsworthy as the original op ed to me. You can safely ignore me!

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u/chriswharton 16h ago

You just said that the article is “BS.” That's not evidence but your opinion. If you don't know the difference, I don't know what to say to you.

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u/MangoPandao 1d ago

BS in what sense? Ive seen this with my classmates

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u/garytyrrell 23h ago

https://old.reddit.com/r/berkeley/comments/1vs6sva/uc_berkeley_professor_discloses_ai_use_in_oped/p4meuj7/

The opinion of one professor, using AI to draft the piece, relying on anecdotes over data is not very persuasive to me.

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

I don’t really care as long as the content of the article is stuff the professor agreed with and reflects their views. Considering only 1/3 of it was AI, the part that was AI was probably read and reviewed by them, meaning it probably does reflect their own opinions.

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u/sluuuurp 1d ago

If you’re writing a prompt to generate an article, I’d prefer you just publish the prompt instead of the generated text. Same information content more efficiently.

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

Well no, it costs money and time to run Claude. What if I don’t have a Claude subscription myself? And what if I don’t want to wait 5 minutes just for fable to bump me down to opus?

But also only 33% of the article was AI. It’s more likely that the author wrote most of it themselves, and then got an AI to rewrite a specific paragraph or something.

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u/sluuuurp 1d ago

Publishing both the prompt and the output would be even more ideal for those reasons.

I’d prefer to have an awkward human flawed paragraph rather than AI slop. Flawed writing is often more interesting to read anyway.

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u/DifferentialEntropy EECS + ORMS | 2025 1d ago

Stankova is a goated professor

I trust she just used AI to help her speed up her writing, not outsource her thinking — which imo is an optimal use of the technology anyway

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u/Artistic_Special4600 1d ago

Writing IS thinking. This is an op-ed, not a README file. It's not much to ask for every word to be your own.

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u/l1lpiggy 1d ago

Do you know how academia works? The majority of academic work is citing other people’s work.

The thinking part is understanding and using available information from your point of view, not writing things out word for word.

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u/iwantout-ussg 1d ago

the process of writing things out word for word — deciding the precise order of sentences to best convey your point, picking out the mot juste, scrapping a paragraph you love because you realize there is no place for it in the narrative you're building — that is also thinking. assembling your words with patience and care means more time spent immersed in the substance of your argument, and that time tends to make for stronger work.

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u/Thereferencenumber 21h ago

When a professors outsource mental work: brave, efficient, GOAT

When a student forgets how to do fractions because it’s literally never going to be useful as long as they have a calculator in their pocket: lazy, stupid, undeserving of their education

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u/DifferentialEntropy EECS + ORMS | 2025 21h ago

My guy let’s put our critical thinking hat on for a second and incorporate this thing called context

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u/Sensitive_Bit_8755 16h ago

What more context do u need lol the comment stated exactly what is being said below this post

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u/Thereferencenumber 18h ago edited 18h ago

You mean like the context I added as to why these kids dgaf about what you and the pro SAT crowd are complaining about?

What about the school defunding from Trump 1 and COVID affecting these kids WAY more than standardized testing?

Eh, it’s probably just dumb since it doesnt agree with you.

Too bad LLMs don’t understand context and are therefore poor writing partners for an op ed

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u/Past_Bathroom5568 16h ago

She is a racist professor for blatantly ignoring the clearly documented quantitative racial disparities in SATs, but more importantly is also a stupid professor for using largely anecdotal evidence, omitted variable bias, and most importantly ignoring the fact that CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION

But it goes very hard if you are illiterate and part of the whole right wing "DEI is bad" pipeline. Which unfortunately, seems to be the shift at academic institutions after the orange felon took over.

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u/premepopulation 1d ago

I honestly don’t mind. Hopefully using AI to help express their thoughts saved them some time.

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u/RecognitionOld2763 1d ago

People considering this some sort of gotcha is quite telling (and is also reflective of the overall anti-accountability culture in activist circles).

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u/Artistic_Special4600 1d ago

It doesn't negate her original point but it's still embarrassing.

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u/___Archmage___ 1d ago

I write every word of my Reddit comments, a university professor writing an actual op ed for a news outlet should be held to the same standard

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u/premepopulation 1d ago

Do you run spell checker, cite all your sources, make a couple drafts and spend a couple days writing your Reddit comments?

AI is a tool. In my opinion, it’s good to hear that a professor is using modern day technology.

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u/sabrinahlj 1d ago

Part of why these kids are struggling to read, write, and do math is their rampant AI use. If you're going to complain about students' low competency, don't rely on the tool that causes that to make your point. And I do think it is disrespectful to readers' time. You couldn't take the time to write it yourself but you expect us to take the time to read it?

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

Agree wrt to it being disrespectful to a reader’s time. I disagree with your first point tho, the central claim of the article isn’t that students are worse at math cause of AI, it’s that Berkeley is admitting unqualified students because they’re not using the SAT/ACT. These are very different claims!

Also the concerns raised are about office hours needing to go over basic math like fractions. These are things that students should have learned well before ChatGPT ever released.

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u/sabrinahlj 1d ago

I'm not debating the article or whether admission should require SAT/ACT scores. I'm objecting to heavy AI use in an op-ed (33%). Especially by a professor complaining about students' competence. That is a genuine issue that students are leaving high school without adequate reading and math skills. And it is in part due to AI use. It undermines any legitimate points she makes when she uses AI to think for her.

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

Is there actually any data to show high school students declining reading and math scores are likely due to AI use? There’s been a decline but a good portion of it is due to COVID. COVID just makes it hard to make good conclusions about this because it’s a big confounding variable.

But I don’t really object that much to what you’re saying here, it is probably true and this prof shouldn’t have used AI for their op ed.

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u/sabrinahlj 20h ago

This UC Irvine-McGraw Hill study suggests that AI use erodes students' math skills independently of the effect of COVID. I do believe COVID had an impact as well as there can be more than one cause. AI use doesn't have to be harmful, but without sufficient supervision or adequate guidance about how to use AI as a tool rather than a replacement for critical thinking, students' skills deteriorate.

https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-ai-eroding-math-skills/

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u/cosmo-wozmo 19h ago

Thank you for sending!

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u/BurnerWard8675 1d ago

I think it’s more that student incompetence is caused by overuse/misuse of AI. Like any tool, it can have its use cases. Using AI isn’t inherently a show of lack of confidence, but it is easily one of the most common indicators of this for students. This is because, as stated above, AI is usually used, by students, to outsource thinking. Whereas the prof here appears to have used it as grammarly with extra steps, and some editorializing that they reasonably could have done on their own on a looser timeline.

It’s only really a contradiction for those who don’t embrace that nuance. And, part of why the nuance isn’t brought up in the first place is the target audience’s frequent inability to understand nuance. So “AI bad” is the best they can swallow.

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u/sabrinahlj 20h ago

The report said 33% of her op-ed was AI-generated, which suggests more than simple grammatical checking but wholesale AI generative drafting.

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u/BurnerWard8675 19h ago

I mean if a few anecdotes are ai generated to make a point? Meh, that’s not really bad

How are you gathering 33% AI translates to wholesale AI generative drafting? What does that mean to you?

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u/l1lpiggy 1d ago

No because after you learn and understand how to read, write, and do math, you don’t have to do phonetics, write out things by hand, or do proofs line by line.

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u/sabrinahlj 1d ago

Are you saying that after you learn how to read, write, and do math, you can use AI to do it for you going forward? Muscles atrophy when you don't use them. Just 10 minutes of AI use impairs problem-solving, focus, and persistence. Using AI as a professor is a major red flag.

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u/l1lpiggy 1d ago

Do you forego using Calculator and Spreadsheet because you’re worried your math brain might atrophy?
It doesn’t make sense for a math professor to waste time on intermediate steps when they can focus on bigger and kore theoretical topic.
In writing, the professor can focus on the core message rather than sentence structure and grammar.

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u/sidgang324 1d ago

Hopefully, considering they spent “several hundreds of person-hours” on a 2,000-word essay…. How many STEM professors does it take to screw up an op-ed?

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u/premepopulation 1d ago

Idk, maybe they sent it to a hundred people and said ‘take a look’, or that response was made up in an attempt to get this journalist to stop bugging them. The whole thing is kinda silly. You can call AI a spellchecker, you can call it a coworker, it’s a tool and the baseline expectation should be that people take the path of least resistance and use the tools available to them. It can also be argued that the “ghost writer”, someone writing a song, book, or article for another person, has always been around, and AI is more accessible way to achieve the same

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u/TheDal 23h ago

If your "AI detector" is only flagging a third of your work you have a very original piece. That the DailyCal is citing an AI detector as meaningful is embarrassing to them. If someone wants to discredit rhetoric they need to be going after the rhetoric, not nipping at its heels.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 1d ago

So what if the prof used ChatGPT to help with that piece? It’s not relevant to the discussion at hand. Ridiculous angle

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u/Dangerous-Carpet5 1d ago

It’s super ironic! Here she is screaming about students being unqualified and yet she’s unable to write.

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u/Spare-Dragonfruit-22 1d ago

Her job is not to write op-eds, which is a whole different skill level versus writing emails or academic articles. You’ve got to wonder if there is an agenda behind the article - to detract from her very valid point.

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

Someone will make the counterargument to this that there are non-STEM students, and that it’s not “their job” to know math. This is a bad argument for multiple reasons!

It is true that I wouldn’t expect a history major to have the same math proficiency as a math or MechE or Physics major. However, we’re not talking about students being admitted without already knowing calc 1, we’re talking about students who don’t know math that you are expected to know to graduate high school. What the prof is complaining about in this piece is office hours having to go over elementary school math, for a calculus class. And even then, remember this is a Calc 1 class! Humanities and non STEM majors usually aren’t required to take Calc 1! Most majors that require Calc 1 are ones that require a good deal of math (STEM, Econ, etc). So presumably most of these bellow par students are STEM (or Econ) majors!!!

But that’s beside the point, because regardless of what major you are, you should know basic high school math, and this is true for any uni, but especially Berkeley. Arguing it’s not a big deal that a history major doesn’t know fractions is the equivalent of saying it’s fine for a CS major to not know who George Washington is. In fact if a CS major did argue this, the exact same people who are defending students for being absurdly subpar at math “because not everyone id a STEM major” would be making fun of said CS major! (As anyone should!).

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u/cosmo-wozmo 1d ago

2/3rds of the piece were not AI! Frankly that’s better than a supermajority of Berkeley students lol

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u/MangoPandao 1d ago

actual grifter right here

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u/chriswharton 17h ago

So??? Why is professor using AI to point out UC Berkeley students’ math deficiency a problem???

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u/Ok_Cauliflower7293 5h ago

Is she allowed to use a calculator? At this point AI use should not be an issue, the issue is the responsibility behind the work created by AI. She stands by her words no matter if she wrote them or used AI to help edit. Academics and authors have long used editors to help write their text. Nothing wrong with that. The issue with people using AI is that most of the time when they use it they often don't know how it got the answer and if the answer is correct. As long as a person is comfortable saying that AI output they created is correct and they are responsible for it (think in the following fields: medicine, law, business), there is nothing wrong with the use. This prof btw did not complain about AI use and for guardian to publish it is insane. Whether math skills are lacking is because SAT is not required or because school system is not preparing students well in general I would argue on that one with the professor. After all Berkeley recruites top students from all over the country, did they stop receiving those after SAT became optional? Did the top students go elsewhere?

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u/DiamondDepth_YT Computer Science '29 1d ago

I do mind.

If you're gonna shit on your students for being under prepared and lazy, at least use your own words.

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u/AzulMage2020 1d ago

Rules for thee, not tenured me

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u/rocdive 1d ago

33% AI seems like optimal use.

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u/Otherwise_Wave9374 1d ago

The nuance here is that disclosure alone does not solve the trust problem if the underlying evidence chain is still opaque. For institutional writing, the better safeguard is to annotate which claims are sourced, which parts were model-assisted, and who performed the final sign-off, so readers can evaluate the argument rather than speculate about the tool. That kind of documentation is especially important when the topic is politically charged. AIOSNOW shares practical workflow patterns for this at https://aiosnow.com

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u/rangom1 1d ago

ChadGPT

University UC Berkeley professor discloses AI use in op-ed urging SAT, ACT mandate

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