Failing grades soar as UC Berkeley CS professors see greater AI usage and dwindling math skills

Summary

UC Berkeley computer science courses had elevated failure rates in spring 2026, with CS 10 at 35.3 percent F grades and CS 61A at 10.6 percent, far above the department's 7 percent guideline. Teaching professor Dan Garcia attributed the rise to a vast increase in academic dishonesty from large language model usage, with nearly 30 students in CS 10 caught cheating on take-home exams. Associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade also documented insufficient mathematical preparation, citing one student whose prior course had an open-internet, open-AI policy.