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.”
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.