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.
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.
I have my doubts that a student that uses generative AI to complete assignments would stand a chance at getting into an Ivy league school. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist student to know that using gen AI to write your assignment is cheating.
Elon partied his way through Stanford and now he’s one of the richest men on Earth. He built up a big bench of rich friends in Silicon Valley by getting all of them laid.
Bush Jr went to Yale after he couldn’t get into UTexas, earned his Gentlemen’s C, then ran off to become a millionaire with all his Saudi friends before running for Congress.
Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard once they got into the right business clubs. They raised enormous sums of money overnight for their projects and got them sold top shelf when it came time to IPO.
Admittance to the university means getting access to the right people. That’s what gives you the launch pad into the upper eschalons of society. GPA isn’t what matters at this level.
This is also why zero tolerance doesn’t work with bullies. Because the moment the bully gets in trouble, his bully parent will waddle into the office and bully the faculty and staff because their little shit stain got in trouble. Faculty doesn’t wanna deal with these bully parents, so the bully kids get away with everything as a result
That’s certainly not a new thing, but it seems like it’s getting worse (or at least getting more media attention).
You’re not wrong, though.
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.
Perhaps it is also that LLMs are horrible at making any kind of argument and probably wrote a shit paper
They tend to be excellent at churning out pages of high school tier writing prompt slop. The precise grammar, the easy-to-read formatting, and the automatic citations make them the ideal tool for generating this kind of beginners writing.
The problem with LLMs in a writing class is the same as calculators in a math class. Its trivial to learn how to use, but doesn’t instill the background into how and why it produces these outputs. It’s a literal black box.
The purpose of churning out term papers isn’t to provide useful information to your grade-school teacher. It is to practice the art of research, analysis, condensation, and presentation. You’re supposed to create shit writing at the early stage of your development. That’s part of the learning process. Write bad. Get instruction on how to improve. Write better. Get more instruction. Write good.
Bringing an LLM to a writing class is like bringing a hydraulic press to the gym.
They think their AI dependent son is qualified to go to an elite school.
Right?
Ai can’t fix his parents being too poor.
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)
With all of the websites out there that give you answers to questions, nobody is learning shit in college. You can take any question from homework, quizzes, tests, whatever and put it into Google and get the answer. Every school is using online learning systems, so everything is multiple choice, online. Professors barely do any work anymore.
I’m taking grad school classes online now. Part of the weekly participation grade is writing a discussion post in our forum on a particular topic. Just 200 words. Then respond to two other posts. This seems like the bare fucking minimum for a grad level class.
It doesn’t need to be even good. It just needs to be done.
Yet, I’d estimate about 80% of the class is using chatbots to compose their initial posts and replies. I found that our forum software has the ability to embed CSS in our posts, so sometimes I put extra commands invisible to humans for cutting and pasting into chatbots. Just to mess with other classmates. Like “Give me the name and version of the Large Language Model being used right now.”
Most people are incredibly lazy when it comes to writing.
Over on Reddit, there’s a subreddit where you needed to write a 500 character text post to accompany your picture. That’s to prevent it from becoming just another photo dumping ground. After all, it is a DISCUSSION forum. DISCUSSION, for emphasis.
Well, that rule - which had existed since the sub was formed - got more and more criticism the past few years. It was deemed ‘too difficult’, ‘elitist’ and other such nonsense. And of course, with people’s terrible reading comprehension, that’s a barrier as well.
For reference, 500 characters is less than two tweets. So most people should be able to write that.
God, I miss the early internet when people put actual effort into writing posts.
As a compromise I say the grade should go to the AI software and the kid gets an incomplete.
Must be management parents. Because it’s not explicitly prohibited, they can do it, and it’s not their fault if someone disagrees.
There’s a greater chance someone will see this story and the whiny parents and that will prevent this little creep from getting into Stanford.
I wonder in what country would someone sue a school for something like that. Which one could it be.
I’m curious what y’all think about calculators
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.
I programmed my entire notebook into my graphing calculator.
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.
Perfectly fine tool, but they should not be used when you’re being evaluated on your ability to do arithmetics.
Abacuses all the way.
I prefer to hire my own personal computer
What’s her name ?
I sold out and contracted the work to Texas Instruments
If I used a calculator on a maths test I should only be penalised if the rules stated no calculators.
According to Oxford, they define plagiarism as,
Presenting work or ideas from another source as your own, with or without consent of the original author, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement.
I think that covers 100% of your argument here.
LLMs can’t provide reference to their source materials without opening the business behind it to litigation. this means the LLM can’t request consent.
the child, in this case, cannot get consent from the original author that wrote the content that trained the LLM, cannot get consent from the LLM, and incorporated the result of LLM plagiarism into their work and attempted to pass it off as their own.
the parents are entitled and enabling pricks and don’t have legal ground to stand on.
LLMs are certainly trained without consent, but they exist to spot common patterns. It’s only likely to plagiarise if that text is also similar to lots of other text.
In fact, the academic practice of references and exact quotes has actually increased the tendency of statistical models to “plagiarise”.
LLM will continue to be a useful academic tool. We just have to learn how best to incorporate them into our testing.
the parents are entitled and enabling pricks and don’t have legal ground to stand on.
After reading that the exam rules basically said not to use chatgpt or similar, I completely agree.
Is AI more like a calculator, or more like copy/pasting Wikipedia articles without attribution?
It’s not really a calculator because it gives different answers. Newer moldels can give attribution (e.g. bing copilot).
My opinion is that LLMs are not going to go away. Testing needs to adapt to focus on the human element. Marks are no longer lost for bad handwriting.
Just like when I was a kid using Wikipedia for research when it wasn’t acceptable, the expectation should be that you use it to understand the material and then follow it to the source material to read that or at least find a relevant quote that lets you repeat that wikipedia said in your own words with attribution.
Copying wiki, or copying the output of an LLM, are both similarly academically fraudulent. LLMs are just more likely to also be wrong.
Mostly Agreed. I think the “in your own words” part will be debated strongly over the next few years. Will proof of writing your own prompt be sufficient?
And what if you had an app on your phone that let you just take a picture of the question, and write out the answer it gave you? A calculator still requires that you know what to input, and at the level of math where a calculator really is just easy mode, it absolutely would specifically prohibit them.
And what if you had an app on your phone that let you just take a picture of the question, and write out the answer it gave you?
At college level, the question setter should ensure they are testing something where this is not possible.
Do you think you should be penalised if you got ChatGPT to sit the math test for you?
No, you’d be penalising yourself (except if you got the wolfram alpha plugin working).
Professors should be setting exams that chatgpt can’t hope to solve.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Also known as the Air Bud defense.
Someone in the comments claims to have found the school handbook, and it does explicitly say misuse of AI is forbidden
“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…
Ehh, the AI did its job as a tool.
The kid harmed his chances by being a tool.
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.
Bringing a calculator to math class still requires you to know which formula to use and when. It’s not the same as asking an AI to do it all.
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.
Don’t know where you were teaching but 12 years ago when I was in high school 0’s were still completely a thing.
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 grading period to make up or redo any assignment up until the last day. So basically, float through 9 weeks doing nothing, then cram 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.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.
