Student “indiscriminately copied and pasted text,” including AI hallucinations.
A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.
Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son’s grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.
The Harris’ motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials “have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law.”
“On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris’ son, referred to by his initials] had cheated,” Levenson wrote. “Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants’ considerable discretion in such matters.”
I find it hard to believe that there was no rule against plagiarism. If he copied from someplace else, no matter where, and didn’t cite his source, it was plagiarism.
He still got a fucking 65.
Not a 0. Not the automatic fail for the entire course he deserved. A 65 on that assignment he didn’t do.
So he’s a High School student and as High School students do, they fuck up. Ideally they are given a punishment, given the ability to learn from it, and grow. That’s why they don’t fail the whole course.
As for the 65, there is a thought that if you give a student a 0 then they are thrown into a hole from which they cannot escape. If there were only two assignments for the class and you received a 0 on the first and a 100 on the second you’d receive an average grade of 50 and fail the class. As a result why try on the second assignment if you fail no matter what. If the 0 is a 65 then you can still dig your way out and pass the class.
The goal is to give growing students a chance to recover. It’s a fine line to walk.
Why do you even fail with a 50? Wouldn’t that be a proper passing grade? After all, why would you have the entire part of the lower scale if it is never used?
Over here in Germany, in “high school” you also receive an “oral” grade. If you do your homework diligently and participate in class, this will cancel out any exam failure. For example, I failed a math exam due to lack of preparation and personal overestimation, getting a grade of four points of 15. Five points is the passing grade. My oral grade was 15 points though because I literally carried the class through the entire semester, so I still passed easily.
Obviously it’s a different system, so I can’t really compare. If 5 out of 15 is a passing grade one might look at that as you only absorbing 1/3rd of the material. If you only know that little of the material you’re not necessarily ready for the next step.
Obviously in my example 2 tests is just an example. Realistically you might have 10 tests. If you score 80/100 on 9 tests and then a 0 on 1 test, you average low 70s, if you got a 65, you average high 70s. The grade of high 70s is a more accurate representation. However change a single one of those 80/100 to another 0 and now you average mid 60s, possibly failing. Keep those two 0s as a 65 and you stay in the high 70s, which is a more accurate representation. If your two 0s are at the start of the semester, even if you improve you’re in a hole.
As you noted in Germany that final oral exam has a higher weight, possibly the most weight when it comes to your grade. However you also mention doing your homework diligently. What if you didn’t? What if you didn’t initially but turn it around?
It’s a balance. Someone who shows clear drive and puts in the effort should be rewarded. There does have to be a bar somewhere, but it’s not black and white.
Sorry, I wasn’t quite clear.
The “points” are the grade. An exam might have 40 possible “exam points” and depending on your result you get a certain number of “grade points”. Usually it was 50% to pass, but this percentage may change depending on the exam’s difficulty.
But still, why would you even have this gigantic set of unused scores in your system? You seem to have a very limited range to determine how well someone did but a huge range to determine how awful someone did. Shouldn’t the difference between a score of 80 and 90 be roughly as much as the difference between 20 and 30?
And there is no oral exam - a better translation would be participation grade. Basically: Do you listen to the teacher and engage with the content or are you ignoring everything, skipping class and obviously not doing your homework? This is a rather subjective grade the teacher decides upon during the course of the semester though it’s usually fair. They are trained for this after all. If you don’t do your homework in the beginning of thr semester but start doing it later on, this will be appropriately reflected in your grade.
Additionally, the written grade (average of all exams - there are usually one or two, sometimes with a few easier tests inbetween) factors into your score at least as much as your oral grade. For math, it’s usually a factor of 2:1, for languages it’s usually 1:1.
But 10 tests sounds insane for me. We only had that for langauge subjects where there were at most 10 vocabulary tests over the course of a semester whose average score was worth as much as at most one exam. The exams are more difficult and there were either one or two per semester per subject.
Although this is not representative of the entirety of Germany since education is left to the states with limited involvement of the federal government.
But still, why would you even have this gigantic set of unused scores in your system?
Someone might be able to answer this better, but that is the system, I’m not sure I can tell you why. I’m guessing it’s meant to roughly mirror how much of the information you (the one being tested) understand/can verify you understood.
So only knowing 50% of the material is considered a failure. (Same for up to 65% of the material in some cases).
In terms of points I understand now what you mean and that is also usually true. Class participation might be 30% of your grade, homework might be 30% of your grade and tests might be 40% of your grade. So 30/30 (participation) + 30/30 (homework) + 5/40 (tests), might result in a barely passing grade of 65/100.
Cheating isn’t a mistake, and a 65 is less than a slap on the wrist.
It’s telling them that cheating is perfectly OK.
I mean if it wasn’t against the rules, I don’t think they should ‘punish’ for it. Then again, I got in trouble for using AskJeeves and DogPile, so I’m a bit biased about new tech and the requirement to give proper instructions to kids (not everyone is great at reading between the lines).
It was explicitly against the rules.
But even if it somehow weren’t, it’s literally impossible for it to not be cheating. Anything that isn’t your own words is plagiarism.
Where was it against the rules and do you have proof beyond the weak assumptions made in the article? Aside from sources that didn’t exist, or citing their use of Grammerly (oh shit, I should cite MS word too because it suggested a synonym so my paper would be more ‘concise’ lol), I’m not seeing much proof. The teachers testimony was largely based on the fact one AI said the other paper had portions of AI generated content, and her feeling like 52 minutes on the final paper isn’t enough. I spend way less than 52 minutes on my final drafts because it was largely just copying/pasting shit from my rough drafts and maybe deciding to reword.
At the end of the day though, we are all making some leaps in our judgement. Allowing the use of AI at the school, then getting pissed at some bs being submitted is like allowing students to use calculators then blaming the student for not being able to show their long division.
The case has been posted all over for weeks, and multiple cited the district policy against AI.
It is literally impossible for using an LLM to write a portion of a paper not to constitute plagiarism. There is no exception. You didn’t write it if an AI did.
LLMs should not be allowed anywhere near a school. Using a calculator in an arithmetic class is absolutely comparable, though, for the exact opposite of the argument you’re making. The entire purpose is to learn to execute the math so you understand the math. If you can’t do it without a calculator, you did not learn the material. Using a calculator in a class that doesn’t allow them is cheating for a reason.
A high school student cheating on a paper is a mistake. High School is the time to make mistakes and allow for corrections. Making that mistake at the College level, that’s a zero. Making that mistake at the Employed level means you get fired.
The parents are completely in the wrong here and are teaching their child the wrong lesson. The parents are making an argument that doesn’t apply to high school students. Hell it arguably doesn’t apply at the College or Employee level, but that’s a conversation for another day.
The school is being lenient to give the student a place to grow from. The school being overly strict and beating down a student helps no one. The school and parents should be in alignment here. A middle ground might have been the ability to redo the assignment.
My only hope is that at this point, after the decision of the court, is that the student understands what they did wrong. I hope the parents do too, but the student is the important one here.
No, making that “mistake” at the college level is grounds for an expulsion. And a well deserved one.
A 0 isn’t and doesn’t resemble a punishment. It’s literally just the grade you earned. A 65 is better than you earned.
Failing the class automatically is the bare minimum to even qualify as a punishment. Letting the possibility of the student passing the class even exist is as flagrant of a statement in support of cheating as the teacher directly instructing a student on how to cheat.
The student was a Junior in high school, 16-17 years old. We don’t need to destroy them to get the message across. Being overly punitive is “an” option, but not one that I would support. Sure if the only options are fail the class or sue the school to overturn the grade, I choose fail the class. However I prefer an option in the middle.
Failing the class they cheated in isn’t destroying them. It’s not overly punitive.
It’s the absolute bare minimum that constitutes any consequences for their actions at all.
I think we’re at an agree to disagree point, but let’s continue with your proposal.
It they fail a class what’s next? Is there an opportunity to make it up within that year? Is summer school an option? Do they need to repeat their Junior year?
If they can make it up somehow within that year, I’m ok with that. If summer school is on the table, I’m willing to hear that out. If someone needs to repeat their entire Junior year? That seems overly punitive.
I don’t think cheating as a 16-17 year old warrants having to repeat a year. I think depending on what’s involved in summer school and depending on what the student has planned, it could be fair but it might be overkill.
I think a 16-17 year old kid deserves a fair chance to correct the mistake. Maybe I’m being overly generous, maybe he’s a whiny piece of shit. Maybe he’s just a kid who didn’t fully understand the technology he was using. This should be a conversation between parent, teacher and student.
Jeez can you imagine being those parents?
Thankfully, as a human being, I cannot.
