Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment

But I heard the kid was responsible for writing all the material the AI was trained on!

/s

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Liar, cheater, and lawsuit wielder? Perfect Ivy League material. Thats how political and managerial elites are made from.

I'm pretty sure there will be a passage about plagiarism in the handbook too.

The student handbook also doesn't have any warnings against inserting it into your rectum, because we expect common sense to tell you that's a terrible idea.

This is the Air Bud argument

No no, see, what ivy league colleges will see is "we have 'fuck you' money and we're willing to blow it on our kid's education".

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.

How do you feel about autocorrect? Plagiarism is still plagiarism.

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 how 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.

It's honestly more impressive that the family even found lawyers to take the case. As someone who's been dealing with a frightfully similar situation at work, entitled parents trying to use a lawsuit to "correct" a clear student error, we've had 4-5 different law firms reach out to us for details about the case, and every time they thank us for our time and refuse to pursue the case further because it's clear the kid was in error.

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.

Apparently they added that after punishing the kid.

A better punishment would have been making him redo the assignment.

Does adding it after the fact give ammo to the parents' case?

The kid used AI. The lawsuit doesn't argue they didn't and are being unfairly punished. They're arguing that there weren't any rules explicitly saying they couldn't use AI.

Sounds like rich parents mad at the world cuz their kid fucked up. How can they ruin our perfect Billy's life over a decision he made, knowing full well it was wrong!!!! Now he might have to go to a less prestigious college... Boohoo!

My wife teaches, and she can spot the AI essays at a distance, it's not hard.

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.

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.

Then they’ll sue Stanford.

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.

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.

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.

Some school districts have funny rules about that. 65% might have been effectively the lowest grade permitted.

Right?

Ai can't fix his parents being too poor.

I don't think using it as a resource would be a good thing. It's not a good tool for that. But I think it's perfectly ok to use it for making nice sentenses out of the data you found in other resources.

If you click through to the court document the most detail it goes into is

During the meeting, RNH recounted that he used an AI tool to generate ideas and shared that he also created portions of his notes and scripts using the AI tool. RNH discussed using Grammarly, and indicated that he pasted sections from Grammarly into the Google document.

RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so. Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted.

Yeah, I'm on the fence because I do totally see how it can help and be a tool, at the same time though it can spit out a passable paper in minutes without much effort. I will say my knee-jerk reaction is if the school didn't want it used, they should say so; I remember a time when I had to sign a paper saying I wouldn't attempt to use a calculator (the teacher insisted no one would ever have one if they needed to find an unknown angle).

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.

Don't give them any ideas.

Because everything is awful, I fully expect to see "homeschooled by AI" within the next 2-3 years.

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.

It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that

It's called your brain / learning. That's why you're there. If the specifics of the curriculum are too tedious, that's on the school to address.

Learning how to parse and comprehend information to find an answer is just as important as the answer.

I wasn't really supposed to do that, but my teacher had no problem with this. I clearly understood the work, and its not just punching the equation into WolframAlpha.

This is the way it should be. If you created the program on your own, as opposed to copying it from elsewhere, you had to know how to do the work correctly in the first place. You've already demonstrated that you understand the process beyond just being able to solve a single equation. You then aren't wasting time "learning" something you've already learned just to finish an otherwise arbitrary number of problems.

Yeah, I got sick of manually inputting my physics lab data in college. TA absolutely had no problem with me handing in a python script as my work instead of a bunch of handwritten formulas.

But this is writing. The thing about writing is that it is the critical skill being taught here. Most classes that involve much writing see it as the crucial element. The student is being taught to gather information, process concepts, and effectively communicate reasonable conclusions from all of it in a way that others can understand. And ideally in a way that’s pleasant to read.

I get it, I fucking hated writing in school. I thought it was pointless and frustrating and that I’d never benefit from it. But it turned out to be one of the most critical skills I was taught. It made me an effective communicator and taught me to better organize my thoughts when attempting to express them, or to understand them. I struggle to think of a way any generative tool could take some of the load without taking a large portion of the lesson away from the student in the process.

The Onion: Teen Nearly Experiences Consequences.

If you click through to the motion to dismiss, it details the AI policy that says if you do use AI just to get ideas, you have to include transcripts of your AI chat to prove that you aren't plagiarizing it.

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.

Abacuses all the way.

Perfectly fine tool, but they should not be used when you're being evaluated on your ability to do arithmetics.

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.

Is AI more like a calculator, or more like copy/pasting Wikipedia articles without attribution?

Do you think you should be penalised if you got ChatGPT to sit the math test for you?

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.