A Massachusetts couple claims that their son's high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.

A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.

An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.

In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.

Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.

  • vithigar
    9·
    1 month ago

    A basic pocket calculator, or even graphing calculator, of the sort you’d expect to see in a high-school are not capable of providing the solutions to high-school level math problems. They’re beyond being given arithmetic with single numeric answers at that point.

    In contexts where you do need numeric answers to a formula, such as in physics, you can absolutely use a calculator and that’s fine.

    • Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
      21·
      1 month ago

      I mean I’ve been out of HS for a bit now, but I definitely remember it being a bit of a debate on whether calculators are allowed or not.

      I get why I’d be down voted initially, as AI and calculators are quite different use cases, mainly the fact they can be a tool to utilize to make things easier.

      However again, I get that it’s a wide difference, with calculators you definitely still have to somewhat understand what you’re doing and why.