GoKawiil
Tech News
A math professor at a California university has decided to stop grading take-home homework assignments, citing widespread use of AI tools by students to complete them. The university reportedly leaves AI policy decisions to individual faculty members rather than setting a campuswide rule.
A UC Berkeley mathematics professor says the prevalence of students using AI tools to complete assignments has led them to conclude that grading homework no longer serves a useful purpose. The professor indicated this shift reflects difficulty verifying whether submitted work reflects a student's own understanding.
The instructor for CS 240: Programming in C, taught in Spring 2026, published a retrospective acknowledging that many students who violated the course's explicit ban on using AI tools like ChatGPT ultimately faced little to no punishment. The instructor attributes this outcome to shortcomings in how the situation was handled, while reiterating that the syllabus clearly prohibited AI-generated solutions and warned that violations might not be addressed immediately.
Dartmouth College is investigating provost Santiago Schnell after its student newspaper, The Dartmouth, found signs of AI-generated text in writing published under his name. Schnell said he used AI for editing and clarity, but when the newspaper ran his own explanatory statement through an AI detector, it also flagged that text as AI-generated. The controversy began after Semafor reported on AI detection tool Pangram finding AI use across opinion pages at major outlets.
Nature's editorial board argues that as AI tools spread through classrooms and lecture halls, universities must not let chatbots replace the human teaching that instills excitement about thinking and learning. The piece cites an accompanying News Feature reviewing early-stage research on AI's effects on critical thinking, and references MIT's recent review of AI use by staff and students, which found temptation to misuse AI rose when students feared missing deadlines.
A tech guide highlights ways students can use AI tools like ChatGPT to create customized quizzes, flashcards and video summaries from dense course materials, tailoring study methods to different learning styles. It also points to project-management apps such as Taskade, which cost between $10 and $50 monthly, as a way to ease coordination headaches in group assignments.