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
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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?
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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
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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.
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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.
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.
Don’t know where you were teaching but 12 years ago when I was in high school 0’s were still completely a thing.
What fucking snowflakes. When I was a kid, if you had someone write your paper for you, you got a 0 for the assignment. When you go to college, they’ll fail you out of the course for that shit (because its cheating).
The only ones harming this kid’s future is the parents trying to coddle their kid and protect them from the (rather light) consequences of their actions.
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It’s funny how this reads like a typical “China bad” comment but goes on to show how economic inequality ruins society.
Not doubting or criticising you at all, just observing that “communist China” has very capitalist problems. If only they were more communist
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Just to add on to this that IIRC while Marx believed that the transition from socialism to communism would happen, the idea of a communist party guiding the people on the way is essentially the crux of Leninism.
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Yeah, sorry. I’m not really a communist either, but I feel Marx has some useful things to say. Lenin… less so. I just feel the need to point that out so people might be less put off by Marx!
The best parts of Actually Existing Socialism are commodity production and a centralized state!
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what
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Centralization here refers to the centralization of power, while there’s degrees to how much power is centralized in any particular state, it is in the end controlled from some sort of central government.
If it was really decentralized it would stop being a state.
There’s a lot of criticism of Chinese capitalist tendencies from the left. Yeah they do some things with communist values and everything but Dengism runs deep. The fact is that in the people’s republic of China the workers lack the power to exert their will on the means of production and the wealthy have the ability to exert outsized power over society and those around them.
As someone working adjacent to highschools in the West, there’s not a single difference in my experience to theirs. It’s not an issue of their economic system, it’s an issue of people around the entire world. Seems like entitlement has never been higher amongst parents.
Yes where privilege and inequality run amok, which is amplified by the economic system
They want this kid to get into Stanford?? 🤣🤣🤣
He cheats from young. Great ivy shit material. Maybe if he rapes somebody he’ll get to be a supreme court justice.
Liar, cheater, and lawsuit wielder? Perfect Ivy League material. Thats how political and managerial elites are made from.
connections over merit
If they had the connections, then the grade here wouldn’t matter.
good point
… allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments.
These are the type of people that force manufacturers to put wildly insane warnings of what not to do with their products.
Idiots. The entire family.
I’m pretty sure there will be a passage about plagiarism in the handbook too.
Obviously, that only concerns copying human work, not copying AI generated work. The art of parroting other people’s work is to creatively rephrase it, right? You don’t have to actually comprehend the concepts if you’re good enough at reciting them.
That’s a joke, using irony to comment on a skewed understanding of academia and people trying to skirt the point to get ahead with less effort.
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.
Now you tell me! 😵💫
This is the Air Bud argument
Way to Streisand Effect the incident for potential universities.
“Our kid will cheat and we’ll sue you for calling him out” looks great on a college application.
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”.
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.
Actually, the lesson I’m starting to see over the past few years is that for certain groups of people, there are ABSOLUTELY no consequences and every failure is just failing up. There’s a good chance this kid will never find out.
Both to them and society.
High-tech fancy plagiarism is still plagiarism.
How do you feel about autocorrect? Plagiarism is still plagiarism.
OK, the parents are suing. And the district already filed a motion to dismiss.
Please understand, the world isn’t a nuts as the headlines tell us. Judges toss frivolous lawsuits all day long. We only hear about the nut cases because they’re nut cases. Money says this case is never heard.
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.
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?
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.
spoiler
When you put it that way, I would bet good money which party these people are voting for.
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.
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?
Then the parents deserve to lose and pay all costs of both parties.
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.
I verified you can do so with ChatGPT earlier, put it in my comment elsewhere. Asked it how many battles took place during the American Civil war, then asked where it sourced the data from, then asked if I was doing a research project on it what books I should consider, and it gave me a list and such.
Because if you didn’t write it, you have to cite it.
If a computer writes it and you say it’s yours, your plagiarizing. You’re not allowed to pay someone to write the essay for you, same goes for a computer.
I do think the method should be mentioned. Kids should be taught to cite what they used ai for and which one amd there should be precise rules stating which use cases are ok and which are not tolerated (some SHOULD be tolerated). Detention is too much though.
All of academia is breathing a sigh of relief that you’re not a teacher.
:) Ok. But why not to teach children how to work with new technology correctly? It’s not as simple as AI bad.
There were rules against using AI, they’re just arguing that they weren’t in the “Student Handbook”.
If you click through to the legal filing linked in the article, they lay out that they informed the students of the rule during a lecture, they have a record of his attendance at that lecture, and parents also got handouts during a parent teacher day.
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During the first week of class, RNH and his classmates were given a copy of HHS’ written policy on Academic Dishonesty and AI expectations.4 The students are clearly informed that this policy applies to all classes, not simply ELA classes. The policy was distributed in RNH’s class on the same day a PowerPoint presentation entitled “AI & Schoolwork” was presented to RNH’s class.5 This is the PowerPoint presentation referenced in paragraph 129 of the Verified Compliant.
Attendance records show that RNH attended the class at which the policy was distributed and the PowerPoint presentation was shown. Furthermore, the written policy was also posted on Google Classroom, on online portal containing policies which is accessible to HHS’ students. It was also distributed at Parent’s Night which was held in September 2023. If RNH’s parents were present at Parent’s Night, a copy would have been provided to them.6
Nah bro, this is common sense for every member of the academic community at all levels.
What’s for sure is that schools and universities need to teach students how to responsibly use AI.
Academics are supposed to get people ready to participate in everyday life as an adult where you will have to be responsible for your actions. If they go into accounting, programming, journalism, engineering, marketing, or any other field that uses AI, he will need to know how to responsibly use it as you said.
It basically is a data aggregator, I would imagine it would be a great tool for a research project, you just need to teach the students to properly use it.
Usually it may be as simple as asking a question, “How many battles were there in the American Civil War”
It gives you an answer.
* “Where did you source that data from?”The estimate of about 50 major battles and approximately 10,500 total engagements in the American Civil War is based on commonly accepted historical research. This data is derived from primary sources, such as the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (a 128-volume collection of reports from both Union and Confederate forces), and secondary sources, including analyses by Civil War historians.
For example, organizations like the American Battlefield Trust and historians such as James M. McPherson have compiled lists of major engagements, while smaller skirmishes are documented in historical military records. However, there is some variability in the total count depending on how engagements are classified (e.g., whether smaller skirmishes or raids are included).*
"What would be a good book for me to reference for a research project on this?
*For a research project on the American Civil War, several well-regarded books offer thorough coverage, blending military, political, and social history. Here are some excellent references:
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“Battle Cry of Freedom” by James M. McPherson This Pulitzer Prize-winning book is widely considered one of the best single-volume accounts of the Civil War. It covers the causes, major battles, and aftermath, providing a comprehensive view of the war from both Union and Confederate perspectives.
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“The Civil War: A Narrative” by Shelby Foote This is a three-volume series that offers a detailed and vivid narrative of the war, focusing on the military campaigns. Foote’s work is well-known for its storytelling style and meticulous attention to detail.
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“This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust This book explores the cultural and societal impact of death during the Civil War and is a key resource for understanding the human cost of the conflict and its broader consequences on American society.
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“For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War” by James M. McPherson This book uses soldiers’ letters and diaries to delve into the motivations and experiences of the men who fought. It’s a great complement if you’re focusing on the personal, psychological, or social aspects of the war.
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“A People’s History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom” by David Williams This book offers a bottom-up view, focusing on the experiences of common soldiers, slaves, women, and civilians. It’s excellent for understanding the war beyond the battlefield and for exploring the social history aspects.
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“Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin While not exclusively about the war’s battles, this book provides deep insight into the political environment surrounding Lincoln, his leadership during the war, and how he navigated the country through its most difficult time.
Each of these books can serve as a strong foundation for different aspects of a Civil War research project, depending on whether you’re focusing on military history, social impacts, or political dynamics. Let me know if you’d like more specific recommendations!
Going and acquiring those books would be considered using CharGPT, and mean I am now eligible to be placed in detention and mark my project down to a D according to the rules the school followed above.
Horseshit.
There was aggregation of data before chatGPT that still exists and it was in fact advertised as a good place to start your research: Wikipedia. You go and do your own reading based on guidance and then write an original paper. Before that, they had a version in writing called the encyclopedia which recommended additional reading (depending on edition).
It is a CLEAR instance of plagiarism to copy and paste from Wikipedia, and totally fine to use its cited sources for your own research. This is exactly the same. If you use the same verbiage, or copy the facts directly (which btw may be totally wrong, because AI says we need to eat rocks) then it’s plagiarism. Someone else has done the work and not been given credit.
Done. Period.
You can ask the librarian, chat gpt, Wikipedia, reddit, your mom, or a local hobo to recommend you reading material and that is fine. Taking their work and calling it your own is not fine. This isn’t brain surgery.
Can you show me where in the article it says the AI wrote the paper or that he copied and pasted the paper from the AI? It doesn’t say that, you filled in the blanks that weren’t there and got upset at the rage bait story. The kid was in the wrong, but if you ask Google, your mom, or the librarian for to help you find sources to write your paper it is the same as asking AI to give you a list of sources to write a research paper. If you asked the last one for the list of sources, it is using AI to help you write it… Which I don’t think should qualify as getting detention.
He likely was an idiot and copy pasted as you said, we just don’t know that information from the article.
I’m not upset at any story, Im perplexed by your supposition that he may very well be getting in trouble for getting a lIt review to guide his research from an AI.
The blanks are easily filled because: 1. Collecting references is not something that is an academic problem (nor is it traceable in this way), 2. nowhere in the article does it say the parents lawsuit contests the use of AI, nor attempt to paint it as something so reasonable as (1), and 3. generating text responses is literally the function of an llm.
Sure, there are benign uses of llms for research like summarizing ideas or writing an outline, but that would be a) hard to prove, and b) if that’s the case it’s the first sentence of the lawsuit that it’s not plagiarism to do that.
I mean what would a lawyer see in taking this case if it were that simple. I would think we are missing a lot of details. I mean clearly he isn’t going to get into those prestigious schools after suing his current school. So something is strange. Sorry about using the term upset though, it’s hard to put tone to text, so when your first word was a cuss word I took it as upset.
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I think I don’t have enough details to agree with you.
Lots of variables, some with make the school look good, and/or the kid.
The student might be an angel who used a small bit of gpt, after saving puppies all night ; or a hellion someone finally had enough of, after repeated issues.
The parents may be bad, absolute stereotypes. Or perhaps there is a deeper story here about why they are willing to publicly humiliate themselves ; which most lawyers and/or common sense would have told them ahead of time.
Nobody here knows that much
While I’m still on the fence, I’m with the other guy until more information comes out (innocent until proven guilty and all). The information we have is that no rules were broken, perhaps instruction though; it would be similar if a teacher said don’t use Google, or Wikipedia, or any other resource. AI is in education for better or worse.
Agreed, that’s why updating the rules and asking the student to do the project over would make far more sense to me. It sets the precedent for if any student does such again.
As I said elsewhere, it could be a great tool, simply asking it for a list of books for the research project would be considered using it, which I don’t think should qualify a student to be placed in detention, or you would need to ban search engines and librarians as well.
Unless the school used one of those ai detection services that are known for giving false positives, I’ll side with the school.
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!
It sounds like all schools should explicitly state no LLM or equivalent on their assignments.
My wife teaches, and she can spot the AI essays at a distance, it’s not hard.
Looks like the handbook does explicitly mention it:
Academic Integrity: Cheating and Plagiarism To cheat is to act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage. In an academic setting, cheating consists of such acts as communicating with other student(s) by talking or writing during a test or quiz; unauthorized use of technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), during an assessment; or any other such action that invalidates the result of the assessment or other assignment. Plagiarism consists of the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author, including Artificial Intelligence, and the representation of such as one’s own work. Plagiarism and cheating in any form are considered disciplinary matters to be addressed by the school. A teacher apprehending one or more students cheating on any graded assignment, quiz or test will record a failing grade for that assignment for each student involved. The teacher will inform the parent(s) of the incident and assistant principal who will add the information to the student’s disciplinary file. The assistant principal may take further action if they deem it warranted. See Code of Discipline.
Apparently they added that after punishing the kid.
A better punishment would have been making him redo the assignment.
Seriously, this was not handled at all well by the teacher.
If that’s the case, then he shouldn’t have been punished. Regardless of people’s feelings about AI, imagine this were any other circumstance. “You did something that’s not against the rules but I don’t like, so I’m going to fail you and give you detention”. That’s a load of horseshit. Imagine they did the same thing if he had the paper transcribed through his speech. You don’t get to make up rules after the fact and then punish someone for them.
The kid had already previously been informed that using AI tools like this is considered academic dishonesty. The rules had been made clear to him before the assignment.
He already got away eays with a 65/100 instead of a 0.
I would consider excessive use of AI in this case as plagiarism.
The biggest issue here is the student cheating himself. You can’t learn if you lean on it too much.
A proper use case would be using an LMM like a tutor. “I have an assignment. Here is my essay. What other points can I make? I’m stuck here. How can I rephrase my point?” Vs “Do my homework for me”
Does adding it after the fact give ammo to the parents’ case?
Students were informed before the assignment, so he knew he shouldn’t have used it. This handbook is not some legal document or something so I don’t think the parents have a case. If anything the kid got away easy with a 65 instead of a 0.
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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.
I once got a very polite correction in middle school because I forgot how to do an algebra problem and so I attempted to find the derivative of the curve instead. I wasn’t going to get it done in the allotted time and I wasn’t practicing the skill I was being taught.
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.
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Of course not, nothing ever goes wrong, why would you even say that.
You must be a very negative person.
Let me guess, business major?
