Degrees should be reviewed for their “exposure to artificial intelligence”, according to a researcher after his analysis showed certain courses have seen the number of A grades rise by nearly a third since the arrival of ChatGPT.
Drawing on publicly available data from a large research university in Texas, Igor Chirikov, a senior researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, examined the marks awarded to more than 500,000 students between 2018 and 2025.
When these grade patterns were compared against syllabus data on the types of writing tasks used for assessment, it revealed the share of A grades in “AI exposed” courses rose by 13 percentage points, or 30 per cent, compared with the 2022 baseline.
Overall grade point average rose by 0.12 points for “high-homework” courses in which AI could potentially complete the assessment, says the study, which was published as a working paper by Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Grade inflation occurred only in homework-based writing and coding tasks and was not found to the same extent in in-person examination, explains the study, which suggests the computing power of “AI [is] substituting for student effort specifically on the unsupervised assessments where instructors cannot observe the production of submitted work”.
