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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.
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Bad parenting. Not only did they not talk to their kid about what constitutes honourable academic conduct, not only did they not talk to their kid about the pitfalls of using generative AI, especially in an academic context, they are now teaching their brat that the proper response to fucking up is to blame the rules, to blame the school, to blame other people. Bad parents.
I wonder, have these people no shame?
Looks like the handbook does explicitly mention it:
Academic Integrity: Cheating and Plagiarism To cheat is to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage. In an academic setting, cheating consists of such acts as communicating with other student(s) by talking or writing during a test or quiz; unauthorized use of technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), during an assessment; or any other such action that invalidates the result of the assessment or other assignment. Plagiarism consists of the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author, including Artificial Intelligence, and the representation of such as one’s own work. Plagiarism and cheating in any form are considered disciplinary matters to be addressed by the school. A teacher apprehending one or more students cheating on any graded assignment, quiz or test will record a failing grade for that assignment for each student involved. The teacher will inform the parent(s) of the incident and assistant principal who will add the information to the student’s disciplinary file. The assistant principal may take further action if they deem it warranted. See Code of Discipline.
Did he cite the LLM properly?
The way I see AI as a tool in a classroom or learning setting is that you should be punished if you willingly used it due to laziness, not understanding the course work, or I assume most likely both. On its own it’s not terrible (environment aside), but it’s certainly not something I’d accept if I were a teacher grading homework.
They want this kid to get into Stanford?? 🤣🤣🤣
He cheats from young. Great ivy shit material. Maybe if he rapes somebody he’ll get to be a supreme court justice.
connections over merit
If they had the connections, then the grade here wouldn’t matter.
good point
What fucking snowflakes. When I was a kid, if you had someone write your paper for you, you got a 0 for the assignment. When you go to college, they’ll fail you out of the course for that shit (because its cheating).
The only ones harming this kid’s future is the parents trying to coddle their kid and protect them from the (rather light) consequences of their actions.
I taught in Chinese universities for 16 years. Initially I liked it. The students were hard-working and respectful. Parents listened to teacher advice. If kids were caught cheating there was Hell to pay … from the parents, not just the school.
Over that 16 year period, though, everything changed. Parents started showing up to middle schools whose response to any misconduct was to privately donate red portraits of Chairman Mao to the school administrators and suddenly all records of misconduct went missing. Marks were “reassessed”. Leading to universities being flooded by the worst imaginable students who’d never had a negative effect to any shenanigans their entire lives.
Only universities are a different world entirely. It takes a whole lot more red portraits of Chairman Mao to get misconduct erased in university. Way more such portraits than all but the top 0.1% could pay. So these poor kids, having slid by for 12 years of no consequences suddenly get hit square between the eyes with consequences that for the first time in their lives Daddy couldn’t erase by waving said red portraits around.
Yes, they were little shits. Yes, I hated them as students. But I still felt bad for them as people because they were made monsters. They weren’t born monsters.
Still didn’t stop me from quitting teaching, though.
It’s funny how this reads like a typical “China bad” comment but goes on to show how economic inequality ruins society.
Not doubting or criticising you at all, just observing that “communist China” has very capitalist problems. If only they were more communist
There’s a lot of criticism of Chinese capitalist tendencies from the left. Yeah they do some things with communist values and everything but Dengism runs deep. The fact is that in the people’s republic of China the workers lack the power to exert their will on the means of production and the wealthy have the ability to exert outsized power over society and those around them.
China is not communist. It has never claimed to be communist. (Nor had the USSR made such a claim.)
“Communist” countries are, properly termed, “socialist” states because in Marxist theory (grossly simplified) the development is Capitalist->Socialist->Communist. In a socialist state the Communist Party is intended to shepherd people along the path to communism. Once communism is achieved, there is no need for a government. As such, the very term “communist government” is an oxymoron.
So China is a “socialist state”. And socialist states, in communist theory, are not about “free medical care” or whatnot, like the “social democracies” of the west (like, say, Sweden) are about. Socialism, in Marxist terminology, is a very specific thing that has nothing to do with free state services (though those may be a desirable byproduct of them). And, get this, socialist states may use capitalist tools to accomplish their ends. It’s just that capitalism in a socialist state is a tool used by the state, and is also under its thumb (which is why billionaires in China fear government; government in the USA, by contrast, fears billionaires).
That being said, yes, there’s huge swaths of inequality in China, and education in particular is currently being massacred by it. The government attacks inequality fitfully here and there, but there does need to be a more concerted and forceful effort for it to actually work.
(Of course, with my more anarchistic leanings, I’m pretty certain that the socialist phase is a regressive concept that will never end because the people who run socialist governments really like this feeling of being in power so won’t be giving it up anytime soon.)
The best parts of Actually Existing Socialism are commodity production and a centralized state!
He didn’t do the assignment. Those parents can get bent.
But I heard the kid was responsible for writing all the material the AI was trained on!
/s
What would the parents’ stance be if he’d asked someone else to write his assignment for him?
Same thing.
Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments
I’ll bet you the student handbook doesn’t explicitly prohibit taking a shit on his desk, but he’d sure as Hell be disciplined for doing it. This whole YOU DIDN’T EXPLICITLY PROHIBIT THIS SO IT’S FINE!!!111oneoneeleventy! thing that a certain class of people have is, to my mind, a clear sign of sociopathy.
Basically their stance is that the school policy didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t use AI, so perhaps the policy specifically mentions another person doing the assignment?
You know, now that I think about it, if I were in an admissions office I’d be keeping a quiet database of news stories like this so I know which people I would automatically reject no matter what their scores.
I probably wouldn’t go to the trouble of making a database of students who might never apply to my school, but now I’m wondering about the legality of background checks or even cursory Google searches as part of the admissions process, because it would surely show up there.
Modern campus have turned into police states. It is literally common practice to scan your emails for anything “interesting”. Sometimes used to spy on protesting students and that was in BLM times, if I remember correctly.
Look into Social Sentinel, if you want to learn more
I would imagine it’s regular practice. Make sure they went to the schools they say they did, make sure they’re not a rapist, that sort of thing.
Yep, make that part of their so called permanent record.
If you work in a job for a year or more (sometimes less), it will become very clear which of your co-workers cheated their way through school. They’re the absolute worst to deal with professionally, and I hate them for constantly producing slop.
their stance is that the school policy didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t use AI,
According to the school’s lawyers, the policy against AI was stated in a presentation that the student attended, and the policy against AI was handed out at a parent’s night and on an online portal, see pg 4-6 of the following: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.275605/gov.uscourts.mad.275605.13.0.pdf
Hah! So it’s even worse! It actually was explicitly prohibited and the parents are still suing!
Definite cluster of sociopathy there.
Also known as the Air Bud defense.
Reminds me of some bass-ackwards story I read about boardgames. A couple was saying “the rules don’t forbid this” so they were putting pieces in the wrong places. What a nightmare that would have been.
People who do that at my games table get uninvited from games nights. I might also point out that the rules don’t forbid me tossing my glass of baijiu into their faces but they’re probably thankful I’m not doing it.
Yeah obvious violations of the spirit of the game are violations of the rules. Play however you want at your table, but at mine we at least play by attempt to have the most shared enjoyment
“a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.”
No, using AI tools harmed his chances…
Yeah, I can’t really understand why anyone would think that you wouldn’t fail for this. You’re being tested on your ability to do something and having a machine do it for you. At most generous to AI it’s like bringing calculators to an arithmetic class.
Ehh, the AI did its job as a tool.
The kid harmed his chances by being a tool.
OK, the parents are suing. And the district already filed a motion to dismiss.
Please understand, the world isn’t a nuts as the headlines tell us. Judges toss frivolous lawsuits all day long. We only hear about the nut cases because they’re nut cases. Money says this case is never heard.
Money says this case is never heard
Considering how many kids get into Ivy League schools purely because of who their parents are and/or home much money they donate, you’re most certainly right
I know, this stuff only gets published because it makes people mad enough to share it and leave comments.
But it works, I kinda hate these parents.
They didn’t even give him the 0 he deserved?
Right? He didn’t earn the knowledge for himself (which is the whole point of school) so he was lucky, IMO, to even get that undeserved 65.
It’s been a while since teachers were allowed to give out 0s in highschool. When I taught 12 years ago the lowest I was allowed to give was a 65. Even if nothing was turned in.
Oh jeez. Maybe it’s that I was in private school but I was a senior in high school and I only stopped getting zeros for un turned in work because my mom got cancer.
I can’t imagine how bad of a student I would have been if “literally don’t do it” was a 65. That’s insane.
“Literally don’t do it” is a 65 and you have the rest of the heading period to make up or redo any assignment up until the last day. So basically, float through 9 weeks doing nothing, then cream in the easiest assignments after school during the last week to get a passing grade.
I imagine this must depend on the location of the school in question. Im in my mid 20s, so my high school experience was more recent than 12 years ago, but I remember getting quite a few zeros (was an absolutely horrible procrastinator who would tend to respond to the stress of having a due date coming up by doing anything else to not think about the source of said stress, which led to a lot of simply not turned in schoolwork)
This was a suburban school outside of a major city in the Midwest US.
Ah, I grew up in North Carolina, so definitely a different region for our experiences then
Ah,
NoChild Left Behind working as intended.
Dude, the fact that the student has to use AI tools to get by, does not mean he’s going to be a success story in life. It just means he’s going to find shortcuts and exploits to make things easier over everyone else that had to do things the natural way. This is no different than someone using calculators in math tests where it’s not allowed. This is no different than someone simply peeking over another’s work and copying down. Using AI generative tools to gain an advantage is in the same ballpark.
So these entitled parents and that entitled student can go get fucked. I hope these universities see this and recognize that this student is a borderline cheater and hopefully deny him anyways if this gets overturned.
I’d say more than borderline cheater but yeah.
In my 20+ year career (god I’m old) every time I felt like I was cheating I was praised for figuring out a faster way to do it.
Granted, the point of education is to learn something and having an AI spit out an essay means you’ve failed at demonstrating your knowledge.
But let’s not pretend that using shortcuts isn’t rewarded outside of school.
…if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it, and you perfect that way and you will have it in pretty good shape.
Is generative AI going to be the calculator of the future? Seems probable, but I don’t know of course.
If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.
But also, if you get caught cheating you just own it, you don’t whine about getting caught.
I can’t possibly see anything that could go wrong with this attitude. Nope. Nothing whatsoever could possibly go wrong. This is all perfectly normal and not even slightly destructively solipsistic.
Of course not, nothing ever goes wrong, why would you even say that.
You must be a very negative person.
Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.
Kid learns nothing by cheating on the assignment.
Well, at least the bad grade and detention will be a teachable moment.
Parents: Hold my daytime wine.
These fucking dickbrain parents. What do they think, they win the lawsuit and Stanford doesn’t realize the kid took a shortcut?
Then they’ll sue Stanford.
why send your kid to school tho if you think they can just solve everything by AI
Don’t give them any ideas.
Because everything is awful, I fully expect to see “homeschooled by AI” within the next 2-3 years.
Shall I go on?
No, I’m depressed enough, thank you.
