Failing Grades Soar as Professors See Greater AI Usage, Dwindling Math Skills in UC Berkeley Computer Science Classes
June 4th, 2026Via: The Daily Californian:
UC Berkeley teaching professor Dan Garcia taught both CS 10, “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” and CS 61A, “The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” in spring 2026. Garcia believes the “primary driver” of these abnormally high failing rates is due to a “vast increase in academic dishonesty” due to students’ usage of large language models, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini.
“Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. “But in other cases, it’s students who are leaning a little too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just really aren’t ready.”
According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.
