UC Berkeley Professor Admits AI Use in Viral Op-Ed Criticizing Student Math Abilities

A Berkeley professor wrote about students cutting corners, but a detector flagged her op-ed

Zvezdelina Stankova says AI only edited the piece, and that 80 of the hours behind it were hers. Zvezdelina Stankova published an op-ed on 15 August arguing that Berkeley admits students who cannot do middle school mathematics. Within days, the argument had been overtaken by a question about how the op-ed itself was written. Zvezdelina Stankova, a teaching professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, made her case in the San Francisco Standard under the headline "I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can't do middle school math". The piece travelled quickly, picked up by Fox News and Townhall, and became a set-piece in the long fight over the University of California's test-blind admissions policy. Then Pangram, the detector Substack uses to flag machine-written posts, was pointed at it and returned a reading of roughly 33% AI-generated or AI-assisted. A post about the result by Chris Hoofnagle, a professor at Berkeley Law, drew close to three million views on X, and the story stopped being about calculus. Stankova has not denied using the technology. She told the Daily Californian that she used AI to help edit the piece, and that the article represented "several hundred person-hours of intensive human work and deliberation, of which about 80 hours are my own". That defence is doing more work than it first appears. Editing assistance is, on most campus policies, entirely permissible, and the distinction between a tool that fixes your sentences and one that writes them is exactly the distinction universities have spent three years failing to codify. Not everyone at Berkeley was persuaded. Hannes Bajohr, who teaches German at the university and writes on machine authorship, told the paper the episode "seems like deception", or at least something dishonest, absent a disclosure at the point of publication. The underlying op-ed makes claims that deserve their own scrutiny, and they are not trivial ones. Stankova reports that before 2020, when tests were still required, 71% of her Calculus I students were ready or nearly ready for the course, and that by 2023 the figure was 26%, with the most common diagnostic score being zero. She also cites admissions disparities between Bay Area schools and notes that five Nobel laureates, among them Jennifer Doudna, have signed open letters calling for standardised tests to return. Those figures come from her own classroom diagnostics and from campaign material, and the university has not published a rebuttal of either. What makes the episode awkward rather than merely embarrassing is the subject matter. An argument about intellectual rigour, written partly with a tool that students are disciplined for using, is the kind of thing that would be too neat for fiction. It also lands in a semester when Berkeley's own computer science faculty have reported rising failure rates alongside heavier AI use in coursework, which suggests the campus is running two conversations about the same technology and has not connected them. The detection question is not settled either. Pangram is among the more credible tools in a thin field, but independent researchers have argued its false-positive rate is understated, and a 33% score is a probability estimate rather than a confession. Detectors have been asked to arbitrate authorship in stranger places, including a project that ran the Pope's writings through them for certification. What none of them can currently do is distinguish a lightly edited human draft from a heavily prompted machine one, which is the case that actually matters. Faculty elsewhere have taken the enforcement problem into their own hands. A Brown University professor moved his assessments back into supervised in-person exams and produced, in effect, a controlled measurement of how much of his students' work the machines had been doing. Regulation is no further along. Under the EU's labelling regime, an AI-written article can go unlabelled while a proofread email gets a marker, and American universities have nothing equivalent to point to at all. Neither Stankova nor the San Francisco Standard has said whether a disclosure will be added to the piece. The argument it makes about UC admissions has not been withdrawn and remains, for the moment, the more consequential of the two disputes.

UC Berkeley professor admits to using AI to edit op-ed about students' math skills

Zvezdelina 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.

UC Berkeley professor who criticized student math abilities admits to using AI to help write viral op-ed

A viral op-ed from a UC Berkeley professor claiming she's forced to teach underprepared college students middle-school math was revealed to be written with some help from artificial intelligence. Professor Zvezdelina Stankova used the op-ed to criticize UC Berkeley's admission standards and was one of thousands of faculty members who signed open letters earlier this year calling for the restoration of the SAT and ACT in admissions. But Stankova admitted to the student newspaper, The Daily Californian, that AI was involved in the op-ed process. "The faculty team and a number of journalists worked intensively on my draft over a period of three weeks with multiple drafts, meetings," Stankova said. She said AI helped edit the piece but insisted there were "several hundred person-hours of intensive human work and deliberation, of which about 80 hours are my own." Her article was flagged by the AI detector Pangram as 33% AI-generated or AI-assisted writing, according to the Californian. The open letters calling for college admissions tests also apparently used AI to edit, according to a joint statement from professors. Stankova's piece gained significant traction online and generated much debate over whether the University of California's admission standards are too low. Stankova blamed the removal of standardized testing for hollowing out the quality of students, leaving her with two different classes of students in the lecture hall: one that is prepared to learn, and one that needs extremely remedial mathematics. Due to COVID pandemic disruptions and concerns over equity, testing was made optional in 2020, with a court ruling subsequently requiring UC to become test-blind through 2025. The use of AI in crafting the piece may generate some controversy, given there's been some criticism of how students use the technology to cheat the academic system. Professors themselves have been trying to root that misuse out. "At the moment, this seems like deception. Or it seems like something that is at least dishonest to a certain reason," UC Berkeley professor Hannes Bajohr told the Californian. "Because it is the person that makes that statement in their capacity as an individual that underwrites what they have written." But Bajohr noted that the norms around AI usage in writing may change dramatically in the future.