this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 hour ago

"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...

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 hour ago

He didn't do the assignment. Those parents can get bent.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 36 minutes ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

They didn't even give him the 0 he deserved?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

Dude, the fact that the student has to use AI tools to get by, does not mean he's going to be a success story in life. It just means he's going to find shortcuts and exploits to make things easier over everyone else that had to do things the natural way. This is no different than someone using calculators in math tests where it's not allowed. This is no different than someone simply peeking over another's work and copying down. Using AI generative tools to gain an advantage is in the same ballpark.

So these entitled parents and that entitled student can go get fucked. I hope these universities see this and recognize that this student is a borderline cheater and hopefully deny him anyways if this gets overturned.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 minutes ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 minutes ago

...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.

Clarence E. Bleicher

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 hour ago

I'd say more than borderline cheater but yeah.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 hour ago

These fucking dickbrain parents. What do they think, they win the lawsuit and Stanford doesn’t realize the kid took a shortcut?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

why send your kid to school tho if you think they can just solve everything by AI

[–] [email protected] 2 points 55 minutes ago

Don't give them any ideas.

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

When I was a kid, we had a period of some repetitive math work I got sick of. So I wrote a TI-84 program to automate it, even showing its work I would write down.

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.

It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that. Like some really primitive offline LLM you were allowed to use in school for basic automation and assistance, but requires a lot of work to set up and is totally useless without it in. I can already envision ways to set this up with BERT or Llama 3B.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 53 minutes ago

to be fair, understanding something well enough to automate it probably requires learning it in the first place. Like obviously an AI that just tells you the answer isnt going to get you anywhere, but it sounds more like the user you were replying to was suggesting an AI limited enough that it couldnt really tell you the answer to something, unless you yourself went through the effort to teach it that concept first. Im not sure how doable this is in practice, My suspicion is that to actually be able to be useful in that regard, the AI would have to be fairly advanced and just pretend to not understand a concept until adequately "taught" by the student, if only to be able to tell if it was taught accurately and tell the student that they got it wrong and need to try again, rather than reinforce an incomplete or wrong understanding, and that theres a risk that current AI used for this could instead be "tricked" by clever wording into revealing answers that its supposed to act like it doesnt know yet (on top of the existing issues with AI spitting out false information by making associations that it shouldnt actually make), but if someone actually made such a thing successfully, I could see it helping with some subjects. I'm reminded of my college physics professors who would both let my class bring a full page of notes and the class textbook to refer to during tests- under the reasoning that a person who didnt understand how to use the formulas in the text wouldnt be able to actually apply them, but someone who did but misremembered a formula would have the ability to look them up again in the real world. These were by far some of the toughest tests I ever had. Half of the credit was also from being given a copy of the test to do again for a week as homework, where we were as a class encouraged to collaborate and teach eachother how so solve the problems given, again on the logic that explaining something to someone else helped teach the explainer that thing too.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago

Think the kid derailed his own future by not following the instructions/norms