The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).

Aside from the irony that Borcherds probably hasn’t graded a homework set in a while, instead let’s examine the purpose of homework. It helps you learn. You can read a chapter and think you understand the material, but doing homework makes you engage more with the material. Recently we’ve used the external motivator of course points to encourage this good habit. But this turns the relationship between teacher and student into a transaction- you do a problem, you get a point. And most young students really don’t care beyond that transaction. They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.

So if we’re not going to rethink the purely transactional relationship schools have with most students, then you probably should stop giving points and grading homework. You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription. That’s possible to figure out. A lot of people have pointed out various equity risks but it’s really just a matter of balancing the AI risk with the equity risk at the weighting acceptable to your institution.

You could also attempt the much more challenging prospect of turning the transactional nature of college into some other relationship which fosters a student’s intrinsic motivation of learning for the sake of learning, but I bet your institution goes bankrupt in the process. So really you should just stop grading homework and put 100% of the grade weight into proctored assessments with some sort of firewall against AI tools. Anyone that faces an equity disadvantage because of this was probably also disadvantaged by the fact that you let rich kids with premium AI subscriptions get better grades on their homework.

>This is common practice among tenured professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them (I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).

No, that's not common at all, nor how the system works. Use of graders/TAs are on an institution basis.

"Grant money" has absolutely nothing to do with it. Grant money is earmarked for specific research and cannot be spent for teaching purposes. When grant money is used to hire graduate students, they are research assistants and must work on the research project which the grant money was given for.

TAs/graders come from separate tuition budgets. Tuition dollars are much more preferred anyway because they're stable and faculty do not have to work for them, they show up based on enrollment.

The fact you have TAs/graders at all is by institution. Large R1 institutions have grad students and undergraduate population to fill these roles. In these institutions, 1 minimally sized undergrad class = at least 1 TA, with additional TAs and graders after some enrollment threshold.

Tenure has absolutely nothing to do with it. Adjunct faculty get TAs/graders all the same.

>The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first >place. He paid assistants to grade. This is common practice among tenured >professors with grant money to spend and graduate students beholden to them >(I’m not making a moral statement, just noting this is common practice).

Grading is part of what it means to be a TA, and being a TA is not some awful exploitation, it's what gives graduate students living money (I was a TA in the 1990s). It makes no sense (except maybe in a small liberal arts school with no graduate students) to have professors grade.

As other commenters said, graders are certainly not paid from grant money at US institutions. NSF (which funds most mathematicians in the US) would never allow it, and grants are usually much better spent getting grad students off teaching so they can get research done. Teaching assistant (TA) funding would ultimately come from the university. Sometimes it is optional, i.e, a faculty member can request a TA or grader for certain courses but does not get one automatically. Some courses, like large entry-level calculus, cannot be run without teams of TAs teaching recitations.

I'm on the math faculty at a R1 (public) university, and we've not had a budget for graders for most courses for a very long time, with the exception of e.g., very large courses. For most classes the instructor does all the grading. Grading has been a significant fraction of my time teaching, certainly much more than what I can spend on preparing lectures and other teaching-related work. Moreover, much of the time grading is giving feedback, figuring out partial credit, etc; just checking "correct" or "incorrect" is often relatively quick.

In the last couple years, my personal experience has been that (i) a very small (and possibly vanishing) fraction of students are declining to use AI, or at least use it sparingly, because they want to learn; (ii) a growing percentage are using it as a personal tutor; and (iii) some are outright outsourcing all the work. The last category is small, but if that category grows (anecdotally this seems to be the case -- I've mostly taught grad courses in the last year and don't have first-hand knowledge) then what would be the point of spending all that time grading and giving detailed written feedback?

Incidentally, many students in the second category are the type who in years past would form study groups, come to office hours, etc.; now they seem to prefer AI over humans. Some of them do seem to benefit from it, but not all. How one uses AI matters a lot, and how to help students use the tech to learn is something we have to figure out (regardless of how we feel about AI's impact on research).

> They are going to college to increase their earning potential, and that’s about it.

Human Interviewer: Congratulations on making it to the 12th interview!

Candidate: Hey, I'm honored to be talk to another human for once!

Human Interviewer: That's funny. And true! Now, it says here you're a recent college grad student.

Candidate: That's right. Had to increase that sweet, sweet earning potential.

Human Interviewer: Also funny, also true! Honestly, what I learned in Intro to Game Theory alone has probably increased my earning potential by 15, maybe even 20%.

Candidate: Oh man, I remember that class! My professor gave up on grading homework that semester because of ChatGPT, and that weighted the midterm and final so much. I never did so much plugging and chugging in my life!

Human Interviewer: That's great. Well, that's about it. Hey, it was a pleasure meeting you. We'll be in touch.

Candidate: ???

> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.

Maybe a problem in the long term, but irrelevant here. These students paid (a lot of) money for this service. The provider of the service needs to stop complaining and do their job (grade the homework). If even a single student did the work themselves, anything otherwise would be a disservice.

Many of the 3rd-tier institutions are going to go bankrupt anyway. Demographic changes had already made that inevitable but AI has accelerated the timeline. If they want to survive at all then they'll need to reinvent themselves as vocational training facilities or senior assisted living or something. This is going to be rough for the faculty, and will make the process of finding a tenure track teaching position even more brutal.

Grading homework is still less degrading then the other shenanigans that professors use students for- as in ghost writting books, having them program apps as unpaid labour or doing similar stuff - including renting them out to other companies on campus as free labour. Academia is just very casty at times..

Graduate students spend 10-20 hours a week grading homework, it's a very time intensive process. But I agree, HW should only be an experience. The entire grade should be determined by an in class midterm and final.

There is no “earning potential” to be gained in a world where you simply ask machine to do X and it does it for you.

We might not quite be there but we’re trucking towards that point at full speed.

> The irony here is perhaps missed by many. He didn’t grade homework in the first place. He paid assistants to grade.

Whether he graded it, or his assistants graded it, I’m not really sure how that matters at all to the point.

One of my freshman math teachers gave grades out for 3 tests and none on homework. He also told us that if we didnt take the first 2 tests, it wouldn't count against us and only the grade on our final would count. Along with that he had extensive open office hours.

It was the math class where I learned the most as well as I wasn't doing rote work and was able to talk to him whenever I had an actual question.

I dont like AI destroying some of our systems but if we return back to the sort of learning that college used to be where it was self directed with guidance from professors, I will count that as a win over the factory worker production system that high school was and universities were starting to ape.

The situation in American academia is something long mirrored in colleges in other countries.

You went to college because it was the only way to get a job that paid well.

When other vocations stopped having the ability to ensure people could enjoy social mobility, people focused on the only pathways left.

I'm going through a self-paced AI intro course right now that was put up online from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the more interesting things the professor says right up front is that while they provide a validation framework to test your homework against and they hold back some pieces of it so you have a hidden checker... There is no ethics expectation that you won't use AI on the problem and you can submit the results against the checker as often as you want.

His thinking is quite simple on this... There's absolutely nothing he could do, practically, to prevent you from feeding the questions straight to an AI and having it kick out the answers. But since this is a self-taught, self-selected course... His advice is to not do that until you get well and truly stuck, and only then will you have enough attempts built up to compare to the answer to understand the concept you're missing.

I think it's a decent middle ground for an online published self taught course. But I don't know that such an approach works in terms of, say, a Carnegie Mellon University being able to continue to charge the tuition it does for the courses that aren't self-taught.

Some of my engineering professors had a policy that you couldn't get a lower grade in the class than your grade on the final. You could and they said some students did turn in no work at all and still got an A based on the final.

This motivation is why, when I was in grad school, I never liked handing out grades. I would have rather just marked the problems I found with a HW submission, added notes where appropriate, and that's it. If no grade is given, it is obvious that you have provided the student the service of reading and checking their work, rather than allowed them to increase their 'score' or collect 'points'.

In interviews I sort of bit the bullet and do pair ai coding interviews - you just have to change with the times

My guess based on my experience as a math major is that they just stop giving homework and the in class tests become more rigorous (can’t imagine how much harder they could have made these at my school at least)

My point is that no matter what tool you’re using, at some point you have to stretch your brain and the exams/screenings/etc just haven’t caught up to how to stretch someone’s brain in this new world and I’ve found just embracing the thing to be a better approach than any sort of pearl clutching

> You have to figure out a new transactional structure that can’t have your tuition made irrelevant by a $20 subscription.

No structure needed, the transaction was always and still is the promise of the social experience and connections for young people. It’s the actual business model; undergraduate education is break even, the only way money is ever made is alums donating to the school due to the feel-good memories they formed when they attended.

Unfortunately, for schools who thought their purpose was to educate, they will be made obsolete in the near future. Expect a lot of schools to close.

But those places that always understood their purpose was for affluent young adults to mingle and connect with other affluent people, they will be just fine.

The irony is that homework barely helped even before AI. I feel like we should move more into self grading extra material for students to peruse if they are unsure about their ability in the subject, rather than adding chore to those that are fine and a point of worry for those that need that bit extra.