San Francisco · California · The Guardian Technology
UC Berkeley professor admits to applying AI to edit op-ed on students’ math skills
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A math professor at the University of California, Berkeley, criticizing a “severe” math deficiency among students in an op-ed for the San Francisco Standard, admitted to using artificial intelligence to help edit the piece.
Key facts
- On its website, Pangram claims it correctly identifies AI-generated documents 99.66% of the time, or gives one false positive about every 24,000 documents scanned
- In 2020, the UC regents voted to phase out the tests as a requirement for application; so did institutions like Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Yale
- The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were “five to eight years” behind and lacked a “middle school
- Before publishing her op-ed last week, Stankova, in addition to more than 3,000 other UC faculty members, signed a June letter supporting admissions testing
Summary
The Standard published a 2,000-word piece by Zvezdelina Stankova last week, in which the professor said some of her math students were “five to eight years” behind and lacked a “middle school” education on fractions and basic algebra. Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed’s language sounded like AI. In response, Stankova admitted she had used AI software to “help edit the piece” but that the article was “the result of several hundred person-hours of intensive human work, of which about 80 hours are my own”. Stankova said by email she had used AI to locate “numerous documents and articles related to the initiative” but that “all analysis is the result of the team members”.