The University of California at Berkeley, on 10 May 2018. Photograph: Ben Margot/APView image in fullscreenThe University of California at Berkeley, on 10 May 2018. Photograph: Ben Margot/APUC Berkeley professor admits to using AI to edit op-ed about students’ math skillsZvezdelina Stankova says she used AI to ‘help edit’ an article about some of her students being ‘five to eight years’ behind
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.
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. Stankova said the UC system’s test-blind admissions were to blame, suggesting that students who weren’t sufficiently prepared for the rigor of Berkeley’s mathematics program were admitted because a longstanding benchmark like the SAT had disappeared.
Over the weekend, journalists at Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, noticed the op-ed’s language sounded like AI. According to Berkeley sophomore Francis Luo, they ran it through AI-detection software Pangram, which claimed 33% of the op-ed had been generated or assisted by 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”.
When asked about their AI usage policy, the Standard – which published the op-ed – shared this statement by email: “While AI may assist, our expectation is that humans are behind every article we publish and take responsibility for every word. Our understanding in working with the author of this op ed was – and continues to be – that this piece reflects her and her colleagues’ extensive original analysis, research and expertise.”
Stankova’s admission has prompted a larger debate on social media on the use of AI by academics. Some criticized Stankova, calling its use “ironic” for a piece discussing students’ underpreparedness, or arguing an op-ed should have been entirely original and written without artificial assistance. Others defended the professor, saying the use of AI was not a serious issue and distracted from the argument at hand.
Stankova, in her email, said “the issue of how AI was used … is orthogonal to and a distraction from the thousands of hours our team has put into the initiative” of reinstating standardized tests in admission.
The debate over whether tests like the SAT or ACT should be again used in UC admissions has intensified over recent years. 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. Each of those peer colleges have since reinstated the requirement.
In her op-ed, Stankova shared data that she and her peers had analyzed, which suggested that the number of students with a “severe deficit” in their readiness for a calculus I class had tripled after test-blind admissions were introduced. Prior to 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. Stankova, one of the letter’s authors, said AI was also used for editing there.
The UC academic senate said in a late July statement that it would begin a review to determine whether standardized tests would again be used in admissions. If reinstated, the changes would affect fall 2028 admissions at earliest.
The UC system also has its own “AI council”, which helps develop AI initiatives and resources for its colleges. Camille Crittenden, a member of the council, said she was unaware whether faculty had any specific guidance regarding the use of AI in personal research or editorials, but said that “most AI detection tools are still quite unreliable and lack nuance” with regard to Pangram.
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.
