College profs go gloriously old school to fight disturbing new trend sweeping schools

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Today, in a full-circle moment, cutting-edge technology has restored the need for pencil and paper — a welcome plot twist.

UC Berkeley professor Richard Borcherds, a prominent mathematician, recently told the California Post that he now bases course grades primarily on in-person exams: no devices permitted.  

“Online exams are now a waste of time as several students just use AI to answer the questions,” the math professor said. “I notice the average score increases a lot in online exams.”

That certainly adds up: As AI has grown more prevalent and students (and others) have learned how to use it, it’s become easy, and tempting, to outsource the hard work of thinking. That temptation can be especially strong in college, where students feel the pressure to compete with others who embrace AI along with the pressure to earn high grades.

So it’s good to see professors like Borcherds, who won the Fields Medal in 1998, install guardrails to help ensure genuine classroom learning. 

Students still benefit from working out math (and other) problems on their own. That’s how they acquire real-world skills, learn to actually derive the correct answers and develop the critical-thinking skills that are transferrable to virtually all aspects of life.

What if at some point AI’s not around to spit out an answer? Or what if the answer’s amiss and a deadline looms?

Students — and all people — should be able to think on their own. To that end, there’s no substitute for studying. In fact, all humans benefit from taking the time to learn the material, rather than plugging variables into a computer and then regurgitating the answer in a report or on a test.

Grasping the value of the learning process, even in a world of AI, is itself a worthy lesson.

Yes, there’s a role for AI in life, work, play and even school, and it’s amazing to see the technology noodle, with some success already, some longstanding puzzles in math, science and medicine.

But as a society, we must ensure that the rise of AI does not mean the decline of the human brain. Toward that end, universities — whose traditional mission is teaching students how (not what) to think — have a key role to play.

So bravo to Professor Borcherds and others like him, for innovating, or improvising, by going back to old school. 

It’s true: Just because AI can do the work for you, doesn’t mean it should.

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