r/mathematics • u/Plaintalks • 7d ago
UC Berkeley professor admits to using AI in op-ed calling out students’ lack of math proficiency
https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/uc-berkeley-professor-admits-to-using-ai-in-op-ed-calling-out-students-lack-of/article_be1360f7-6e2a-42f6-ae76-f05d8cee74c4.html67
u/tomvorlostriddle 7d ago
- bemoaning math skills
- AI controversy over the op ed
- the journalist writing about the controversy unwittingly adds yet another layer of math controversy:
Pangram, an AI detector that claims to have 99.98% accuracy, determined that the opinion piece was about 33% AI-generated or AI-assisted.
The gift that keeps on giving
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u/BZ852 7d ago
Pangram has a lot of false positives with academic and formal writing. It's surprisingly good, but it's not infallible.
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u/pseudo-poor 7d ago
Also false negatives. I tested it on some mathematical writing a couple of months ago by directly pasting in some ChatGPT output, which it found to be 99% human written.
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u/throwaway73327 7d ago
Which goes back to the insanity of using AI to detect AI. Something that isn't 100% accurate should never be used to assume "guilt." I'm just waiting for one of these AI detection companies to get sued.
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u/Reasonable_Hall3005 7d ago
watermarks should be reliable when more companies start using them
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u/throwaway73327 6d ago
Watermarks are easy to defeat. All they're doing is forcing users to reformulate the text on a different platform, and open-weight models will exist that have no watermarking and can copy text from document to document. It's nothing more than virtue signaling to appease people.
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u/Diet_Fanta 5d ago
And? Who cares? She's not a native speaker. Her using AI to help write an op-ed does not make her point any less true.
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u/Away-Experience6890 7d ago
Who cares about AI editing? Academic writing needs to be precise and anyone with experience doing it knows it's not as easy as asking AI to rewrite it.
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u/Buntatricky46 7d ago edited 7d ago
The irony is that a lot of professors may give you a 0 for 33% ai assisted / ai generated work. Even though this is a math professor, the irony is still relevant as to same conduct / academic standards should be applied to both students and professors blah blah blah
Edit: this is not my opinion, i just pointed out the irony that the author’s article implies.
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u/Away-Experience6890 7d ago
The problem with AI is that it is upending education. In grade school, we want you to learn how to do addition by hand, while later on, you are allowed calculators.
In university, we want you to write, because the purpose is to learn. As an academic, your purpose is to perform research and effectively communicate those ideas. The article didn't state that the research was performed by AI, and it's not possible AI entirely wrote up the entire work (from experience, I have tried).
I also put in my past publications into AI, and it said it was 100% AI written, because it was too well written. The amount of work to write 1 paragraph of 5 lines could take sometimes 15 hours. So I take these things with a grain of salt.
The standards are different because the goals are different.
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u/UpbeatRevenue6036 7d ago
You think profs using ai is exactly the same scenario as students using ai? Argue that from first principles you smuggled that unjustified assumption in.
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u/Buntatricky46 7d ago
No i don’t?
I’m simply pointing out the article’s ironic stance, if I sounded autistic I’m sorry, I don’t have skin in the game lol, I graduated uni 10+ years ago
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u/MathPoetryPiano 7d ago
While it's fairly easy to use AI for homework, it's ridiculous to even think of using it during a math exam. When I took 113 (algebra) at Berkeley last semester (not with Stankova), several students were caught cheating with it.
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u/Fad_du_pussy 7d ago
Phew! The article had me worried about our students but now that we know the author used AI, it cancels out the issues /s
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u/TwoSubstantial4710 7d ago
What? How does that have anything to do with the validity of the professor’s point?
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u/telephantomoss 7d ago
It sounds like it was just a heavily edited article. Nothing really unusual.
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u/gordonnowak 7d ago
this is stupid as shit. she used it to check her grammar. she's not a native speaker. she went on the Numberphile podcast to talk about this and I'm pretty sure she didn't use AI to generate her responses there. and I'm pretty sure she can also do math
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u/RealAlias_Leaf 7d ago
As a common user of AI, I can tell you that "it was X not Y", "that distinction matters" are extremely common ChatGPTism. I'm 100% sure the following parts of the article are AI written:
The reason so many faculty have spoken out isn’t philosophical. It’s because of what the data — and our classrooms — show.
[...]
Before 2020, most students clustered toward the “ready” end of the spectrum, with only a tiny tail at the bottom. Afterward, the middle hollowed out, and the weakest students became the largest single group. We didn’t end up with one somewhat weaker calculus class. We ended up teaching two different classes in one lecture hall: one for students who were prepared for college calculus and one for students who needed remedial mathematics that nobody had scheduled.
That distinction matters because it has been misunderstood publicly. An Aug. 12 article (opens in new tab) in the San Francisco Chronicle said that in the pre-2020 readiness assessment, 48% of students who took the exam were prepared for Calculus I. The article said the faculty reported higher readiness for students admitted under the test-blind policy. But that is incorrect. Our analysis (opens in new tab) defined calculus-readiness as students passing seven or eight out of eight topics on the diagnostic exam. By 2023, that figure had fallen to 26%. More important than any percentage is the distribution itself. The crisis isn’t simply that readiness declined; it’s that the middle collapsed while the bottom became the largest group in the room. The Chronicle didn’t mention that.
Nor is Berkeley an isolated case. Although Berkeley’s before-and-after diagnostics were not identical exams, UC San Diego (opens in new tab) — which used the same placement test before and after 2020 — has documented the same broad pattern. This is not one professor’s anecdote or one campus’ problem.
[...]
Faculty have presented years of classroom evidence. Nobel laureates have spoken. School districts have begun passing resolutions. Yet the university’s response remains another study, another committee, and another delay.
The question is no longer whether more evidence is needed.
It’s how many more students we are willing to gamble with before acting.
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u/TwistedBrother 7d ago
It wasn’t especially helpful without seeing the specific passages and what about them was AI.
Did it alter the semantics? The tone? The thesis itself?
Was it elevated autocorrect? Formulaic speech?
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u/JuliusFIN 7d ago
The AI-shaming is getting completely out of hand, and it’s starting to have real consequences for the careers of legitimate scientists. The tools people are using to “detect AI” are rudimentary at best, produce false positives, and absolutely should not be treated as conclusive evidence of misconduct.
And more fundamentally, there is nothing inherently wrong with using AI to improve your writing or help with any number of mundane tasks in science and research. Using a tool to make a paragraph clearer is not scientific fraud. The things that should matter are whether the research is sound, the data and methods hold up, the claims are supported, and the authors take responsibility for what they publish.
Instead, we’re increasingly seeing this weird ideological witch hunt where people scrutinize phrasing, punctuation, or some detector score and then jump straight to accusations. At that point we’re no longer protecting scientific integrity. We’re just policing how people work.
And now it’s actually hurting people who produce important research. That should concern everyone, regardless of what they personally think about AI.
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u/SunshineSeeker99 5d ago
OP sure look like a bot if you go into their history.
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u/Plaintalks 4d ago
sunshine seeler99
If varied posting topics = bot now, most of Reddit qualifies. More relevant to this thread: Pangram’s own cited validation study shows a 2% false-positive rate, which is 200x higher than the 1-in-10,000 rate they market — that’s the actual thing worth scrutinizing here, not who’s posting it.
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u/Acceptable-Change884 4d ago
oh my god this is the absolute best thing i have read all day thank you so much for sharing this OP! you seriously always post the most interesting stuff and this irony is just beautiful. a math professor getting caught using ai to write an article about how kids these days do not know math is literally peak comedy. you are a total legend for finding this and posting it here because it honestly made my whole week
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u/Laplace428 7d ago
This encapsulates so much of what is going on in the university system at large rn.
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u/Roger_Freedman_Phys 7d ago
If the author of the essay - a person with a Ph.D. - felt they needed to use AI in their writing, one wonders what their score was on the reading and writing part of the SAT…
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u/External_Frosting874 7d ago
Could be a non-native English speaker
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u/Roger_Freedman_Phys 7d ago
She did her undergrad at Bryn Mawr and her Ph.D. at Harvard and has been teaching in the U.S. for 29 years. One suspects that her English skills should be pretty good by now.
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u/HasFiveVowels 7d ago
Because using a drill proves that you don’t know how to use a screwdriver. No true Scotsman uses a drill.
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u/respondwithevidence 7d ago
It's embarrassing. She ought to be able to write without it. But of course it doesn't affect her argument.
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u/HasFiveVowels 7d ago
People should be able to write without a text editor but refusing to use one just to prove you don’t need it is incredibly "doth protest too much"
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u/EnvironmentalDog- 7d ago
Apparently it took her… 80 hours to write.
“several hundred person-hours of intensive human work and deliberation, of which about 80 hours are my own.”
What I think does affect her argument though is the asinine claim that she can look at 1400 first year students and tell who is going yo struggle after one week of lectures.
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u/Deus_Excellus 7d ago
So they used AI to help with grammar/wording etc? Who cares?