Top California professors expose pitfalls of campus AI push

Artificial intelligence has turned college classrooms upside down, and some of California’s most prominent professors are fighting back with a decidedly old-school weapon: paper.

The California Post spoke to professors from UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley and Stanford about how AI is affecting their classes. Some said they were cutting it out altogether and only properly grading written work done in class without tech.

Others said they were using it to their advantage and saw it as a positive force in their lessons.

“The technology has been shoved down all our throats and we’re all just dealing with the fallout,” Morgan Polikoff, professor of education at USC Rossier told the Post.

Polikoff, who is on leave from teaching, said he had already planned to switch more of his graded undergraduate assignments to sit-down, paper-and-pencil tests.

He said he’d likely adopt a policy similar to that of renowned UC Berkeley math professor Richard Borcherds, who made headlines for no longer grading homework for correctness.

Two years ago, Polikoff caught a freshman writing a paper with AI after he had banned it. He said it was easy to spot, and the student owned up when confronted. Polikoff made him rewrite the paper from scratch.

“I think in general we will need more standardized and AI-proof measures of everything, both in college admissions and once students are enrolled at university,” he said. “It’s become increasingly difficult to know what anyone knows and can do, and that signal is important.”

“I don’t see any point at all in a student completing an assessment by running it through AI and handing in to me whatever it spit out for them—that is a waste of my time and theirs,” he added.

USC leaves AI rules up to individual instructors, who can set their own course-specific policies. Polikoff said his PhD program is debating a policy now, though any rule would still let faculty make their own calls.

The university also pays roughly $3.1 million a year for a ChatGPT Edu subscription covering 80,000 users. Polikoff called the sum “pennies” compared to what USC pays its football coach.

Across town at UCLA, statistics and data science lecturer Thomas Maierhofer has taken a hybrid approach.

“All exams are in-person on-paper exams without the use of phones or laptops. All work done outside of the classrooms like homework and labs are graded on completion,” he said.

Maierhofer sees AI as a potential teaching tool. He’s developing ALISSTAIR, a custom chatbot built to support student learning. He said his exam policy is what keeps students honest.

“As long as the exams are in-person and on-paper students are only hurting themselves if they use AI to cheat instead of using it to enhance their own learning,” he said.

Up at UC Berkeley, Borcherds, whose decision to stop grading homework for correctness made waves this fall, said he now bases grades mainly on in-person exams with no electronic devices allowed.

“Online exams are now a waste of time as several students just use AI to answer the questions,” he said. “I cannot tell which students are using AI, but I notice the average score increases a lot in online exams.”

The University of California lets individual campuses and programs impose stricter AI rules, especially for admissions and academic integrity.

At Stanford Law School, professor Julian Nyarko is more bullish, though not on humans.

“I think AI has tremendous potential. I think many humans are not great teachers. So I’m skeptical of human capability, more so than I am overly enthusiastic about AI capabilities,” he told the Post.

“I think there’s great variance in the quality of teachers and I think AI can definitely have a positive impact if we learn to use it well, especially if the counterfactual is having a poor teacher,” he added.

In a study Nyarko led this year, 16 law professors blindly rated answers to common student questions, and they preferred Google’s AI over their own colleagues 75% of the time. The researchers stressed that the study measured answer quality, not whether AI tutors help students learn in the long run.

He also warned that there is a wrong way to use the tech.

“There’s a way to use AI that will harm students, an irresponsible use, which is basically, just write this paper for me or solve this question for me,” he said.

Nyarko has always given in-class exams.

He said many of his colleagues used to assign take-home exams lasting as long as eight hours. With one or two exceptions, they now feel they can’t, out of fear that students will simply hand the work to AI.

He said that trying to restrict students’ access is a fantasy at this point, since the vast majority already have it.

“AI will require significant change in how we do things,” he said. “We’re basically moving from a world where we kind of thought we knew how education works reasonably well, to a world where we don’t know how to best educate students. We have access to AI, and that requires a lot of figuring out.”

Stanford gives all students free access to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude through a pilot running until August 2027. Unless an instructor sets a stricter rule, students may use AI to help them learn but can’t pass off its work as their own.

The debate has spilled into next week’s race for state schools chief.

Sonja Shaw, the Republican candidate for California Superintendent of Public Instruction, said over-reliance on AI robs students of the critical skills that colleges and employers demand. She said the fix is a return to academic rigor and objective standards.

“More AI-assisted work and grade inflation made it easier to disguise who actually learned the material and who didn’t,” Shaw said. “Objective testing remains the best means to measure student skills in an environment where they can’t simply rely on ChatGPT to do the work for them.”

“AI should, at best, be viewed like the calculator: it may eventually be useful as a tool, but can be dangerous if you don’t first understand the foundation of what it’s helping you accomplish,” she added.

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