The opinion section of the San Francisco Standard published an op-ed over the weekend that quickly reignited the ongoing debate over SAT and ACT requirements in UC admissions.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In about 2,000 words, UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova argues current UC system admits are underprepared, as selected students are not evaluated against baseline test scores in a piece titled, \u201cI teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can\u2019t do middle school math.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The op-ed has spawned a conversation online about students\u2019 proficiency in math. The New York Post ran a story on the article, and a post about it by UC Berkeley Law professor Chris Hoofnagle has almost 3 million views on X.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The article was flagged by the AI detector Pangram as 33% AI-generated or AI-assisted writing. A similar result was found in a June open letter from STEM faculty advocating<\/a> for standardized testing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe faculty team and a number of journalists worked intensively on my draft over a period of three weeks with multiple drafts, meetings,\u201d Stankova said in an email. She added that she used AI to help edit the piece but that the article is the result of \u201cseveral hundred person-hours of intensive human work and deliberation, of which about 80 hours are my own.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The June open letter from STEM faculty advocating for standardized testing in UC admissions was signed by thousands of academics, including five Nobel laureates and was partially written by Stankova.\u00a0<\/p>\n Stankova and a team of writers, including Hoofnagle, physics and math professor Mina Aganagic and\u00a0math professors Svetlana Jitomirskaya and John Lott,\u00a0said in a joint statement with nearly identical language to Stankova\u2019s that the open letter<\/a> was written over multiple weeks and in consultation with faculty across the UC system. AI, they said, was only used to edit the article.<\/p>\n In an email to The Daily Californian, Pangram CEO Max Spero said his company\u2019s technology \u201chas a false positive rate below 0.01% and can identify the boundaries between human-written and AI-written segments with high accuracy, particularly for long texts.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the use of AI detectors such as Pangram in the classroom has been controversial.\u00a0<\/p>\n UC Berkeley instructors do not have access to plagiarism checker Turnitin\u2019s AI detection service due to concerns that it cannot offer conclusive proof of AI usage.\u00a0A UC Berkeley webpage with guidance on using AI detection software cites studies finding that they are biased against non-native English speakers, and other research shows that detectors such as GPTZero can produce inaccurate results.\u00a0<\/p>\n However, a University of Chicago study this year found that Pangram improved upon other detection models, achieving near-zero error rates.<\/p>\n