Does Using AI to Edit an Op-Ed on Students' Math Skills Undermine the Argument? (theguardian.com) 67
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: 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." Should the op-ed have been entirely written without artificial assistance or is the use of AI a distraction from the argument at hand? That's the question at the heart of the debate playing out online.
According to the op-ed, Stankova and her peers found that the number of students with a "severe deficit" in their readiness for a calculus I class had tripled after the University of California adopted test-blind admissions. Some students were allegedly five to eight years behind and struggling with basic algebra and fractions, among other concepts.
Much of that decline, Stankova argues, is from the removal of standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, which served as important benchmarks for identifying whether applicants were prepared for Berkeley-level coursework.
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." Should the op-ed have been entirely written without artificial assistance or is the use of AI a distraction from the argument at hand? That's the question at the heart of the debate playing out online.
According to the op-ed, Stankova and her peers found that the number of students with a "severe deficit" in their readiness for a calculus I class had tripled after the University of California adopted test-blind admissions. Some students were allegedly five to eight years behind and struggling with basic algebra and fractions, among other concepts.
Much of that decline, Stankova argues, is from the removal of standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, which served as important benchmarks for identifying whether applicants were prepared for Berkeley-level coursework.
Well of course they are focusing on AI. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we sure as fuck aren't going to focus on the poor mathematics skills of our youth. Much much easier to attack the messenger then actually debate the salient points being made by the Op-Ed.
Now I personally enjoy writing so I'm not likely to invoke AI for a template or setup piece to edit. I would however allow AI to assist me in research. Sure, I'd need to verify that, but that's true regardless. You always need to verify your sources when you are writing anything. Well, real journalist and academics would anyway. Just a couple years ago I was finishing a degree and I had a end of year project to build. It required I list all my sources to backup what I was ultimately submitting. Shame we have a lot of lazy frauds that would rather just cheat.
So yes, I'm quite sure the Internet is attacking this person's AI assisted Op-Ed because they know it's correct but don't want to face the music that we're doing a major disservice to our youth by letting them slide on Math. IE letting them slide on critical thinking and logic. Who needs logic when we can just appeal to emotion, like Trump!
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I agree. AI may or may not be wonderful, but it's becoming a buzzword that's used to automatically label something (or someone) as fraudulent. Whatever use the author may have made of AI, the article should be critiqued on its merits, not on how it was created.
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Re:Well of course they are focusing on AI. (Score:4, Interesting)
Forget calculus 1, I would be happy with basic multiplication, division and fractions. Schools treat math like it's the annoying extra course that you need to take, but doesn't matter, so they'll give you an A, and you're fine. Let's start teaching calculus in primary school, just the basics, which any student should be able to handle easily.
Do you blame the students, do you blame the teachers, or the curriculum, where is the blame to start? I've told the story on Slashdot a few times that my daughters would bring math homework home, and it would be the most confusing, idiotic, stupid, ridiculous "new math" style homework. In a few cases trying to quiz them, they couldn't explain the method to me, but fair enough, they're not teachers. When I asked the teachers to explain it to me, they couldn't. It wasn't that I'm dumb and couldn't figure it out, there were steps missing, the old meme 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, is what was happening.
I modelled one of the questions in Octave, and proved there was a step missing, when I confronted the teacher over it, she refused to listen, then insisted I was wrong, but never explained what I had wrong. Sure enough, I wrote the textbook author, and she was able to explain the issue, there was a literal step missing from the textbook. She explained how to do the method correctly, it was still idiotic, and ridiculous, but how did a teacher not notice that issue?
We've basically taken a simple area of education, and turned it into a cluster bleep of unintelligent nonsense, that can't be passed onto a generation, and then we're amazed kids can't figure anything out. It doesn't help that kids in primary school are told they need calculators! A calculator, for what? What do you need a calculator for in primary math? If you can't do 1 x 1 -> 20 x 20 in your head, a calculator won't help. If you can't convert easy fractions in your head, a calculator won't fix that. We've failed to teach math, and instead of realizing that, we're blaming a professor for leveraging AI in a reasonably sensible manner because it's all handwaving and excuses.
Re: Well of course they are focusing on AI. (Score:2)
Do you blame the students, do you blame the teachers, or the curriculum, where is the blame to start?
They're your children. You should know better than anyone else how to motivate them to practice and learn. You should read to or with them, talk to them about current events at school or anywhere, practice math, show them how to keep physically active when they age out of playing games, and not be a dick about any of it. It sounds like your kids are smart, buy a little whiteboard and work through some interesting problems with them.
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Do you blame the students, do you blame the teachers, or the curriculum, where is the blame to start?
As a parent, you've got to be careful with that one. There's a set of people who tend to be the ones where most people start blaming, and they typically live in the same home as the children. Of course, as you point out the common core math stuff was terrible. It does sound like your kids at least had a textbook? Many parents had to deal with their kids just getting handouts and the only lessons on how to use the "ribbon diagrams" etc. being given to the students directly in class making it impossible for t
Re: Well of course they are focusing on AI. (Score:2)
Blame starts at home, blame the parents.
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Just a couple years ago I was finishing a degree and I had a end of year project to build. It required I list all my sources to backup what I was ultimately submitting.
Do you mean a bibliography? Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but it sounds like you got most of the way through a degree without having to put bibliographies on your papers. I'm not sure if that would be ironic given that you're complaining about the slipping standards for kids these days or if it would back up your argument.
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They're not so bad, they just define things like "it is easy to see...", "clearly", "it suffices to show", "recall that..." to mean completely different things than normal speakers of English or, well, language.
Calc 101 (Score:2)
You're going to jump into Calculus 101 without 3 years of algebra? I probably would but I'm sure I would do terribly.
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You're going to jump into Calculus 101 without 3 years of algebra? I probably would but I'm sure I would do terribly.
Someday, you'll make a fine overly confident, but incompetent, initially beloved by some, then hated by most President - or replacement South Carolina Senator. :-)
Doesn't it support it? (Score:3)
Granted it's in a different discipline, but the instructor having to use AI to write backs up the claim that people are forgetting things by using AI. It's a bit ironic for other reasons, but still supports the point.
Re:Doesn't it support it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted it's in a different discipline, but the instructor having to use AI to write backs up the claim that people are forgetting things by using AI. It's a bit ironic for other reasons, but still supports the point.
On the other hand, she was born in Bulgaria, so English is probably a second language, so getting help writing a piece to be published doesn't seem unreasonable. I imagine she also had other people review a more completed revision before submission.
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That's completely irrelevant. It would also be irrelevant if she was complaining about English students rather than math students. The act of learning has always had different requirements than the act of doing and executing.
In grade school we teach people how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Once they have LEARNED that skill, we give them calculators. The act of learning provides understanding.
Put that to the real world: Do you want an engineer designing a bridge when they don't understand the underl
ApplesGPT to OrangesGPT (Score:2, Informative)
No evidence was given that math skills are atrophying because of AI, nor was that even claimed in the op-ed, which criticizes slipping testing standards.
Re: ApplesGPT to OrangesGPT (Score:2)
Not even that, she was talking about admissions exams? When you stop filtering out people that aren't great at math you get more people that are less than great at math, and I don't think that says much about them though because you just changed the filter.
Anyway I'm actually impressed there's like five whole people that read half of the summary, that's something.
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Where did it say they had to use AI? And is asking an AI to proofread something that much different than MS Word flagging spelling and grammar errors?
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Great question, and I think there isn't any significant difference.
But LLMs use a type of math that apparently has the evil bit set. Meanwhile, up here in VirtueVille, the computer code we write to create things, uses different math that doesn't have the evil bit set. Conclusion: we can look down on those AI companies and their stupid users. ;-)
Now, I wouldn't expect an AI service to be better at
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No. Seriously. Think again about what you wrote. Here is a hint: An OpEd piece is not learning material.
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Granted it's in a different discipline, but the instructor having to use AI to write backs up the claim that people are forgetting things by using AI. It's a bit ironic for other reasons, but still supports the point.
Is using AI to help edit worse than using Gramatik or a spell checker or a buddy?
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Others have noted that the article wasn't claiming that AI is the reason that math skills are atrophying. Also, it seems to be all in how you use it. The AI has gotten mostly good enough at this point that it can be a pretty good math tutor. I mean, it's maybe more like studying with a friend who understands the material pretty well, but still misunderstands some things about the questions. But, it's a friend with infinite patience. For some students, it will help them learn far better than a teacher or mat
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No it's not. Using a tool during the course of teaching is not the same as using a tool during the course of learning. There's a reason we don't give kids in grade 1 a calculator and ask them to first understand how to add numbers together.
The entire article is stupid ragebait for stupid people who have ceased applying any thought to the world around them.
Completely different (Score:5, Insightful)
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and what are we calling AI here? does spell check count as AI because Word sure as shit is incorporated Copilot into that functionality.
this is just elementary school tactics, try to get someone else in trouble for doing "the same thing" even though we all know its not the same thing. it plays out every day and its increasingly pathetic and disheartening to watch.
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Can't believe this is even a story. Of course it doesn't matter. There are differences between what the Professor is complaining about and using A.I. to help write her opinion piece: 1) It's a completely different subject area. She's a math teacher, not an English teacher. But even an English teacher might use A.I. to assist in writing an opinion piece that has nothing to do with his/her academic life. 2) It wasn't coursework. If she was doing it in an English CLASS maybe there would be a point. 3) She was writing an opinion piece for wide distribution. It makes sense to get some assistance in doing so, and/or helping do the research to support the piece. That's exactly the type of thing A.I. is actually useful for.
What really hits me wrong here is it sounds like the AI was used in the editing process, not the writing process. While I personally have opted out of using AI for editing due to concerns they'll be skimming my fiction for training data, I can't fault somebody for wanting to have any type of technological editing help if they aren't primarily focused on language in their own field. I mean, technically, anyone that relies on something like Grammarly, which happens in several business settings, is using AI to
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when i first read the op-ed it sounded "AI" to me also. (the op-ed https://sfstandard.com/opinion... [sfstandard.com] )
things like:
"We didn’t end up with one somewhat weaker calculus class. We ended up teaching two different classes in one lecture hall: ".
It also had some weird maximalist phrases. like "piling students at exactly zero". And a section title like "The math collapse". to me these all read like structures that Gemini writes when i argue with it about things.
Like it really likes to write "pun
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I think the point is that if a math teacher can use AI to write a paper and thereby elevating their skills without any investment, then why can't a dumb student use AI to do the same? Eventually we'll all be dumb as rocks and require an AI to do basic thinking so we can get back to the important things, like masturbating and watching tv. It's kind of a moot point, really, because convenience always wins out in the end.
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I don't think AI only dumbs people down, I just think it feeds people's proclivities.
If I look stuff up with AI (sometimes I give up and do it because the search engines are all so shit now) then I double-check what it shows me and I learn unrelated things in the process.
If you look stuff up with AI and just say "duhhhh OK" and repeat what it says then yeah, that's going to make you dumber.
So basically the people who were getting smarter looking things up without AI can still be getting smarter looking thin
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I think the point is that if a math teacher can use AI to write a paper and thereby elevating their skills without any investment, then why can't a dumb student use AI to do the same?
We could address your question if the premise were true. Unfortunately it isn't. She was not just a math teacher, but a university professor. And per TFS, she did not "use AI to write a paper." She used AI to help edit a paper in which she and others invested hundreds of person-hours of effort. She did not just press a button to create the op-ed.
Re:Completely different (Score:5, Insightful)
Would like to add one tidbit because I've had this same conversation at work. The professor stated they used AI to help edit only after hundred of hours of writing. In other words, they did the heavy lifting and only used AI at the end to help refine what they had already done.
Is this any different than a human editor? If I write a book, do what I can to edit it down, then go to an editor who makes suggests, removes or reorders parts, and so on, is that any different than having AI do the same thing? In both cases you wrote the words. In both cases you went somewhere else to help edit.
If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.
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...
If people claim that using AI to edit a work is "cheating" because it's no longer your work, then the same should apply to a human editor.
I mean... that certainly used to be the case when i was going to school. Also there's editing and then there's ghostwriting. Traditional editing doesn't rewrite, it just gives comments, afaik.
What AI does is more like co-writing.... or ghostwriting.
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If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless. -- Erwin Schrödinger
I agree, using an AI editor is very much like using a human editor. As long as the AI doesn't alter your message, or make major contributions, it is acting as a critical reader who offers good-faith improvements to your message from a different perspective. Just like a human editor.
Stephen Hawking was annoyed once with an editor who made an enormous number of suggestions for chan
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This is a basic straw man. The op-ed mentions AI once, almost as an aside.
+12, Insightful (Score:2)
My Zoomer kids loathe their contemporaries for a reason.
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If AI was only used as an editor for grammar and spelling it shouldn't be flagging an AI detector - so either the AI detector sucks or AI wrote actual full sentences of her op-ed. The latter is lazy.
It's a shame this detracts from the point that colleges are allowing students in that are ill equipped to get any return for the their money paid to the school. That
Re:Completely different (Score:4, Interesting)
If your title is 'Professor', that should imply you don't need help with basic things like writing your ideas into a coherent paper or essay.
If AI was only used as an editor for grammar and spelling it shouldn't be flagging an AI detector - so either the AI detector sucks or AI wrote actual full sentences of her op-ed. The latter is lazy.
It's a shame this detracts from the point that colleges are allowing students in that are ill equipped to get any return for the their money paid to the school. That is theft by the school.
It's a moving target. I just listened to a podcast with Terrance Tao, a former child prodigy generally to be among the top (if not #1) among living mathematicians, https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ter... [dwarkesh.com] , where he says his current math papers that he writes would take 5x as long to write without AI because he uses it to generate graphs and examples and simulations. He also points out that's not to say it made thing 5x faster, because if he didn't HAVE AI ... he'd just write simpler papers without as much illustration and elaboration.
(To me this sounds a lot like what a "financial analysis" looked like before spreadsheets vs after. )
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Yes. But these exceptionally obvious facts are apparently too complex for the average person to understand.
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This is getting stupid. It's like saying "we checked your travel time and we suspect you didn't walk under your own power for the entire journey". Who gives a fuck?
This is a bit extreme (Score:5, Informative)
Second, if AI's job, like any tool, is to make our lives easier, then editing something seems like a good use of the technology. When i write stuff, I often will get all my thoughts down as best as I can, but then use AI to evaluate if the message can come across in a more impactful way with fewer words, which helps to make it clearer for my intended recipient. In that the AI isn't generating the information at all, it's doing what it's actually good at, ie looking at text and recommending changes based on what people who are better writers might do. Particularly someone like this professor whom, just by judging based on her name, English is likely her second language so she may not be the best at communicating in writing. If that's what we're talking about here, this seems like a non-controversy.
No! (Score:3)
AI has nothing to do with anything here. The crtical component that we should be facing is:
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.
University students lacking middle school level fractions and basic algebra? That is horrendous!
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Yep. Looks like people that are missing the very basics get admitted to university. That will not go well for society. Or for them.
Yes (Score:1)
https://assets.sfstandard.com/... [sfstandard.com]
I was left wondering what were the criteria for acceptance and I am reminded of an observation I found on students taking GCSE exams in the UK (a series of exams for 15 year olds). Between a fifth and a quarter are a
Wait (Score:3)
Regardless, most students at Berkeley don't need Calculus 1. And if students do need it, but aren't ready, then send them to the next class down until they are ready.
And complaining about not having the SAT or ACT...? Just do your own math placement test, Berkeley, it's not difficult. Seems like a problem that Berkeley could solve, rather than whining about it in an op-ed. Sheesh.
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Regardless, most students at Berkeley don't need Calculus 1. And if students do need it, but aren't ready, then send them to the next class down until they are ready.
Calculus 1 pretty much is the lowest-level math class at Berkeley. There's a math fundamentals refresher class, which is for people who are pretty much at pre-calculus level. But if they're saying students really don't understand fractions, it's a mystery how they even got into Berkeley. California has an amazing community college system that will teach you all the way down to basic algebra if you need it, and once you spend a couple of years there, there are easy avenues to transfer to the many high-qualit
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I seriously doubt admissions is boiled down to merit. They'll look at your community service, race and income as well. Why any of that has anything to do with academics is beyond me. It's almost like they bring on students that might not necessarily be qualified to be there for "reasons".
P.S. Yes, I know technically they can't use race anymore but there are other ways to inference the same information. I'm quite sure each application isn't assigned a number to prevent this either. Clark Davis is probably no
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I seriously doubt admissions is boiled down to merit
It's high school GPA in a set of courses and class rank (top 9%). Class rank is always an odd factor to use because it helps those who are in a school with an overall lower academic performance level (because it is 'easier' to get into top 9%); but being in a lower academic performing high school is generally bad for your *personal* performance because there are fewer students to push you and usually those schools don't offer the most rigorous or AP courses. There's also an "exceptions" pathway for students
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The person whining likely does not have the influence on campus to get admissions to actually do such a math test of their own. That is a good idea though. My community college did this for me 25 years ago as I didn't do SAT or ACT because I knew I was just going to community college anyway. I took a couple placement tests and they recommended classes based on such.
The ironic thing for me, I some how managed to get recommend pre-calc but really wasn't ready for it. I ended up eventually just taking an easie
No (Score:2)
Apples and oranges, generated drama and clickbait. Move along..
Numberphile podcast discussion with Stankova on it (Score:2)
To be fair to the professor ... (Score:3)
To be fair, she's a Math teacher, not an English or writing teacher - Wilipedia says [wikipedia.org] born in Bulgaria, so I'm guessing English is a second language - so her getting help from AI with the writing part is different than if it had helped her with any math in the article, which I couldn't tell from TFA as it's paywalled, and it's different than her math students getting help or answers from AI on math assignments - the thing they're there to learn. To round this out, students getting help from AI explaining and/or expanding on answers they've already solved themselves seems okay.
Strawman / Ragebait (Score:3)
The Professor in question barely mentioned AI. Instead The Guardian ran a hit-piece on her that doesn't even properly engage with her points until more than halfway through.
This is the only mention of AI in the whole piece:
And as The Guardian article says "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."
College Course (Score:2)
It's a college course. If you fail the course, you get an F. Then it is up to the university's policies for if and how you get to continue. This isn't that hard.
If the college graduates people who have not completed the coursework to a certain standard, it becomes much more difficult to hire from that college.
how to test whether an argument is undermined (Score:2)
If the math professor had written the article without AI assistance, would the students' math skills have improved?
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Indeed. But this extremely advanced reasoning technique is far outside of the capabilities of people writing articles as stupid as the one we have here.
This article basically insinuates that using an LLM in one domain taints the work of a person in some completely different domain. Or something. This makes absolutely no sense. I have no idea how people can be so utterly mentally dysfunctional.
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Once, many years ago, I fell off a balance ball and hit my head. No concussion, but there was a 3 - 5 second period where I was so disoriented that I did not realize I was lying on my back, staring at the ceiling. For that brief period, I was certain, and happy, that the aliens (or whomever is in charge) had finally decided to call the stupid experiment off and tell me what the heck is actually going on.
Once my head cleared I figured out that I'd simply taken a fall, but the lesson for me is that my subcons
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Indeed. The main theory I have is this is an experiment how many utterly dumb people and how many complete assholes you can mix in without the whole thing becoming dysfunctional. I am not sure whether this is a success or a failure so far. I am tending towards "failure".
Not a problem (Score:2)
First, writing an OpEd piece is not teaching or learning math. An LLM could have told you that. Second, this person already knows math and is good at it. Hence using an LLM does not impact their skills.
Yeah and? (Score:1)
Instead of copy-pasting a postdoc or grad student's verbiage as her own she cut out the middleman and cheated all by herself.
Much better in my opinion than copying off of someone else's cheating and claiming it as your own. We're not animals after all.
An incident comes to mind from about a decade and a half ago when I was in grad school and our research group was collaborating with a university on the wrong side of the planet.
One of their postdocs submitted a progress report that was almost completely copy-
AI Sideshow (Score:2)
No, and stop play-idiocy rhetoric please (Score:3)
Answer: No, using AI to write an op-ed has no impact on the report about dismal math skills, besides improving the organization and legibility of the report which is a positive. The most important point is that college students lack elementary school arithmetic skills, and no test is being used to replace SATs. Actually AI might be useful in both teaching remedial skills as well as in evaluating readiness for college. Maybe some effort could be put into developing free, online automated teaching assistance that does not track you, that can be used by any prospective student to see where they stand and attempt to advance. Maybe a non-judgemental, free AI tutor with multiple teaching methods available to it could teach kids fractions for example, and it could be done long before college entrance.