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.
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
Perhaps it is also that LLMs are horrible at making any kind of argument and probably wrote a shit paper, never mind the plagiarism? Frankly a 65 is a high mark for doing something like this
Someone else in the comments said that it’s possible (may vary by state / locale) that 65 may be the lowest grade they’re allowed to give now. So if that’s the case, I suspect the teacher would have given them a 0 if they could.
Yeah, I don’t get that at all.
I’m also reporting that secondhand based off another comment, so take it with a grain of salt.
This is one reason why people don’t want to be teachers and why education is going down the toilet. Entitled parents who run to lawyers in our hyperlitigious society every time their spawn is slightly inconvenienced.
The story is an eyeball grabber precisely because it is being pitched as “stupid entitled parents”.
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.
Hingham High is regularly ranked as one of the best schools in the country, and has a reputation operating as a feeder into the Ivy League and similar tier universities. In these kinds of high-stakes environments, GPA and Class Rank are a form of commodity that parents (not unjustifiably) go to the mat to wrangle. The difference between admittance and denial to a school like Stanford can be hundreds of thousands a year in future professional income for the kid.
But that’s the real root of the problem here. A single grade on a single test in a single class determining a student’s entire socio-economic trajectory creates all sorts of moral hazards. One of which is parents willing to litigate over a grade.
Perhaps the problem isn’t with this particular pair of parents realizing the stakes, but with an increasingly steep pyramid of incomes based on where you enter the workforce.
Honestly this is a big reason I can’t root for our society in its current form.
Everyone in an area, barring diagnosed disability requiring special education, should go to the same PUBLIC schools to develop empathy with Americans who don’t live behind their guard gates, to have similar academic starting points if even a partial “meritocracy” is something we’d like to try to actually aspire to, and to reverse rich parents having no skin in the game and forcing them to advocate FOR public schools with their power rather than lobby to further destroy them for tax cuts because being greedy sociopaths is kind of their thing.
The idea that a child’s future prospects are so dependant on their parent’s socioeconomic status, rather than solely the child’s aptitude and motivation, makes this whole place nothing but a bad clown show to me. Feudalism with a marketing team.
In a country where intelligent and hard working children are lost to schools we starved to cut wealthy sociopath’s taxes, while dynastic entitled nitwits like George W Bush and Donald Trump literally cannot fail despite barely being able to walk without tripping on their own shoes or bankrupting yet another company, trying just makes one a sucker.
Everyone in an area, barring diagnosed disability requiring special education, should go to the same PUBLIC schools to develop empathy with other Americans, to have similar academic starting points if even a partial “meritocracy” is something we’d like to try to actually aspire to, and to reverse rich parents having no skin in the game and forcing them to advocate FOR public schools with their power rather than lobby to further destroy them for tax cuts because being greedy sociopaths is kind of their thing.
In theory, I’m right there with you. Everyone should go to the “Good School”. But then I’m sitting here in HISD, watching Mike Miles tear the fucking wiring out of the walls specifically to Own The Libs in Harris County for daring to elect a few municipal democrats. And I can’t help think, “Maybe forcing people to go to these child warehouses and low-grade torture facilities is bad aktuly”.
In a country where intelligent and hard working children are lost to schools we starved to cut wealthy sociopath’s taxes, while dynasty entitled nitwits like George W Bush and Donald Trump literally cannot fail despite barely being able to walk without tripping on their own shoes, trying just makes one a sucker.
I feel this in my bones. But I also recognize this as a consequence of social networks that are built up over generations. It isn’t as though Bush and Trump (or Obama or Clinton) just appeared at the top of the administrative hierarchy by accident. They climbed (or were carried) through vast webs of political advocacy groups and donors and religious organizations.
Trying doesn’t make you a sucker. But understanding what you’re trying to accomplish (and who will assist/oppose your efforts) is important when you’re trying to gauge what will be successful or worthwhile.
They think their AI dependent son is qualified to go to an elite school.
Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.
High-tech fancy plagiarism is still plagiarism.
How do you feel about autocorrect? Plagiarism is still plagiarism.
Article doesn’t say if he used AI to wholesale write his paper, which obviously is cheating, or if he used it as a resource like Google. Some details would be nice here.
He should have gotten a zero.
Did he cite the LLM properly?
I wonder if Stanford University and other elite schools would have allowed an AI generated paper?
I feel if this kid didn’t get caught in high school he definitely would have at any university.
My university would give you an automatic F for plagiarism/cheating that would effectively set you back 2 years.
It is good this kid got caught when he did, because all he gets out of it now is one bad grade and a lesson to not use LLMs in the future (hopefully, the parents don’t seem to be the best in this regard)
These fucking dickbrain parents. What do they think, they win the lawsuit and Stanford doesn’t realize the kid took a shortcut?
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.
Removed by mod
Of course not, nothing ever goes wrong, why would you even say that.
You must be a very negative person.
They want this kid to get into Stanford?? 🤣🤣🤣
connections over merit
Liar, cheater, and lawsuit wielder? Perfect Ivy League material. Thats how political and managerial elites are made from.
He cheats from young. Great ivy shit material. Maybe if he rapes somebody he’ll get to be a supreme court justice.
I hope these parents get their legs kicked out from under them. The kid cheated and got caught.
These kids need to learn what “fuck around and find out” means by themselves. Sheltering them from consequences does a lot of damage later on.
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?
spoiler
When you put it that way, I would bet good money which party these people are voting for.
Having worked with parents like this before: No. None at all. They’d rather throw thousands of dollars at different attorneys hoping one of them will take the case to teach their children to never have shame.
Should kids use chatgpt to do their assignments, probably not. I think everyone here is looking at this in the wrong way though. If they rules did not state he could not use it, a proper response to me would be to tell the kid to do the project over without using chatgpt on another topic, and update the rules. Instead they did the school equivalent of arresting the student and detaining him (detention), and marked the assignment poorly which impacts his future.
The kid should not have done this.
The school/teacher also should not have done this.According to the information we have, no rules were broken, so it was an unwarranted punishment.
On a side note your comment is also very “fall in line” thinking. One could argue the parents are standing up for their kid and teaching him how to stand up for himself.
The authorities need to follow written laws and procedures. Otherwise we are just punishing people for being different.
Everyone should be mad at the school because we are having to use taxes to address a situation that a teacher could have addressed long before by just telling the student to do the assignment over.
Standard citation rules already rule out using AI to write your essay.
How, you can ask the ai for where it sourced the info, and what books to acquire. You just used AI, and can use whatever citation method the teacher asks for. If you mean for the AI to write the essay, I would say it is plagiarism, but to use AI is no different than using a search engine to find sources.
Shit, you could use the AI to tell you how to properly write your citations in the form requested by the teacher as well.
you can ask the ai for where it sourced the info, and what books to acquire.
I don’t know which LLM you’re using, but I haven’t seen any that disclose that information. And if you ask the probable word generator, you’ll just get probable words back, no guarantee that they’re real sources.
Bullshit. Every academic honesty policy I’ve seen says, in short, to do your own work, including this school’s:
Hingham Public Schools, however, claims that its student handbook prohibited the use of “unauthorized technology” and “unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own work.”
If the student tries to pass off AI writing as his own, it definitely falls under that second clause. Does it really need an exhaustive list of all the places/people/technologies to not copy from?
