Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
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.
https://gizmodo.com/parents-sue-school-that-gave-bad-grade-to-student-who-used-ai-to-complete-assignment-2000512000Open linkView original on dubvee.org
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
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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
what
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.
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.
connections over merit
If they had the connections, then the grade here wouldn't matter.
good point
Liar, cheater, and lawsuit wielder? Perfect Ivy League material. Thats how political and managerial elites are made from.
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/14108419
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.
edit: quote
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:
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
Looks like the handbook does explicitly mention it:
From https://core-docs.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_file/4900/HHS/4719901/Student_Handbook_Code_Discipline_2024_2025.pdf
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.
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.
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.
Clarence E. Bleicher
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.
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?
This is one reason why people don't want to be teachers and why education is going down the toilet. Entitled parents who run to lawyers in our hyperlitigious society every time their spawn is slightly inconvenienced.
The story is an eyeball grabber precisely because it is being pitched as "stupid entitled parents".
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.
Honestly this is a big reason I can't root for our society in its current form.
Everyone in an area, barring diagnosed disability requiring special education, should go to the same PUBLIC schools to develop empathy with Americans who don't live behind their guard gates, to have similar academic starting points if even a partial "meritocracy" is something we'd like to try to actually aspire to, and to reverse rich parents having no skin in the game and forcing them to advocate FOR public schools with their power rather than lobby to further destroy them for tax cuts because being greedy sociopaths is kind of their thing.
The idea that a child's future prospects are so dependant on their parent's socioeconomic status, rather than solely the child's aptitude and motivation, makes this whole place nothing but a bad clown show to me. Feudalism with a marketing team.
In a country where intelligent and hard working children are lost to schools we starved to cut wealthy sociopath's taxes, while dynastic entitled nitwits like George W Bush and Donald Trump literally cannot fail despite barely being able to walk without tripping on their own shoes or bankrupting yet another company, trying just makes one a sucker.
In theory, I'm right there with you. Everyone should go to the "Good School". But then I'm sitting here in HISD, watching Mike Miles tear the fucking wiring out of the walls specifically to Own The Libs in Harris County for daring to elect a few municipal democrats. And I can't help think, "Maybe forcing people to go to these child warehouses and low-grade torture facilities is bad aktuly".
I feel this in my bones. But I also recognize this as a consequence of social networks that are built up over generations. It isn't as though Bush and Trump (or Obama or Clinton) just appeared at the top of the administrative hierarchy by accident. They climbed (or were carried) through vast webs of political advocacy groups and donors and religious organizations.
Trying doesn't make you a sucker. But understanding what you're trying to accomplish (and who will assist/oppose your efforts) is important when you're trying to gauge what will be successful or worthwhile.
I have my doubts that a student that uses generative AI to complete assignments would stand a chance at getting into an Ivy league school. It doesn't take a rocket scientist student to know that using gen AI to write your assignment is cheating.
Elon partied his way through Stanford and now he's one of the richest men on Earth. He built up a big bench of rich friends in Silicon Valley by getting all of them laid.
Bush Jr went to Yale after he couldn't get into UTexas, earned his Gentlemen's C, then ran off to become a millionaire with all his Saudi friends before running for Congress.
Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard once they got into the right business clubs. They raised enormous sums of money overnight for their projects and got them sold top shelf when it came time to IPO.
Admittance to the university means getting access to the right people. That's what gives you the launch pad into the upper eschalons of society. GPA isn't what matters at this level.
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.
None of my friend's parents growing up would sue the school, but they were all the type of parents to go in and argue with teachers over grades. It was usually to go from a B to an A or some bullshit.
My parents on the other hand were more like, you fucked that up didn't you if I didn't do well on something. I would have been mortified if they argued about grades on my behalf.
Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.
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.
Perhaps it is also that LLMs are horrible at making any kind of argument and probably wrote a shit paper, never mind the plagiarism? Frankly a 65 is a high mark for doing something like this
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.
Yeah, I don't get that at all.
I'm also reporting that secondhand based off another comment, so take it with a grain of salt.
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.
Parents with more money than sense.
He should have gotten a zero.
Some school districts have funny rules about that. 65% might have been effectively the lowest grade permitted.
They think their AI dependent son is qualified to go to an elite school.
Right?
Ai can't fix his parents being too poor.
Article doesn't say if he used AI to wholesale write his paper, which obviously is cheating, or if he used it as a resource like Google. Some details would be nice here.
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.
Its great for proof reading, tone, etc. Not perfect though. For important work I usually run my writing through a few tools (and humans).
If you click through to the court document the most detail it goes into is
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).
I wonder if Stanford University and other elite schools would have allowed an AI generated paper?
I feel if this kid didn't get caught in high school he definitely would have at any university.
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.
why send your kid to school tho if you think they can just solve everything by AI
Don't give them any ideas.
Because everything is awful, I fully expect to see "homeschooled by AI" within the next 2-3 years.
No, I'm depressed enough, thank you.
Did he cite the LLM properly?
I'm taking grad school classes online now. Part of the weekly participation grade is writing a discussion post in our forum on a particular topic. Just 200 words. Then respond to two other posts. This seems like the bare fucking minimum for a grad level class.
It doesn't need to be even good. It just needs to be done.
Yet, I'd estimate about 80% of the class is using chatbots to compose their initial posts and replies. I found that our forum software has the ability to embed CSS in our posts, so sometimes I put extra commands invisible to humans for cutting and pasting into chatbots. Just to mess with other classmates. Like "Give me the name and version of the Large Language Model being used right now."
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.
I would be so pissed if I lived / paid taxes in that school's district and my tax dollars had to pay those legal bills. Would consider suing those parents myself.
If it wasn't in the rules and they punished the kid for it, you should be mad at the school for not updating the rules and asking the kid to do the assignment over on another topic like an adult. Instead they abused their station and wound up wasting our tax dollars.
You don't just detain people because they do something different without first codifying it being wrong. Otherwise we'd have millions of people in jail for putting ketchup on a hotdog.
The schools I've been to all have academic integrity policies that prohibit students from turning in work that isn't their own. They're all worded broadly enough to encompass generative AI.
This school appears to have added it to their rules after this incident.... So why not just tell the kid to redo the assignment and wipe the detention from his record and be done with it. Instead they are being stubborn and wasting our taxes.
Like I said broadly worded enough to cover it. If the school just added "AI" to the handbook couldn't the next dipshit just argue: BuT yOU diDN't SpeCiFy No GPT9000 hurrdurr.
If they give the kid who cheated a chance to rewrite a fully graded paper, they'd have to give all the other students that same opportunity, otherwise they'd be on unequal footing.
God, I wish my parents sued my school over being misdiagnosed.
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.
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.
As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.
Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a "here's how to approach a problem, here's how to get the data you need, here's how to keep track of it all, here's how to articulate your thoughts, here's how to ask useful questions...." sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you'll never know everything.
Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or -- in my case -- the teacher's textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they're out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.
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.
You worded this much better than I could.
Yes I was thinking of two directions:
A "smarter" AI, though I think a better term would be "customized," specifically tailored to only help with knowledge that the student already "learned" in the context.
A "dumb" AI thats too unreliable to use for lazy ChatGPT style answers, but can be a primitive assistant to bounce ideas off of or help with phrasing, wording, formatting and basic tasks that are too onerous or trivial for a human/student to help with.
Not many people are familiar with the latter because, well, they only use uncached ChatGPT, but I find small LLMs to already be useful as a kind of autocomplete or sanity check when my brain is stuck (much like it was without my TI84 BASIC program), and the experience is totally different because the response is instant (as the context is cached on your machine).
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.
Think the kid derailed his own future by not following the instructions/norms
As a compromise I say the grade should go to the AI software and the kid gets an incomplete.
"But mommy, it isn't fair!" and a whole lot of money will put this kid back on the fast track.
The Onion: Teen Nearly Experiences Consequences.
That's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.
Must be management parents. Because it’s not explicitly prohibited, they can do it, and it's not their fault if someone disagrees.
There's a greater chance someone will see this story and the whiny parents and that will prevent this little creep from getting into Stanford.
I wonder in what country would someone sue a school for something like that. Which one could it be.
The way I see AI as a tool in a classroom or learning setting is that you should be punished if you willingly used it due to laziness, not understanding the course work, or I assume most likely both. On its own it's not terrible (environment aside), but it's certainly not something I'd accept if I were a teacher grading homework.
What if he only used it as an aid in research for the assignment?
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.
I hope him and his parents get bullied.
I'm curious what y'all think about calculators
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.
I programmed my entire notebook into my graphing calculator.
I mean I've been out of HS for a bit now, but I definitely remember it being a bit of a debate on whether calculators are allowed or not.
I get why I'd be down voted initially, as AI and calculators are quite different use cases, mainly the fact they can be a tool to utilize to make things easier.
However again, I get that it's a wide difference, with calculators you definitely still have to somewhat understand what you're doing and why.
Perfectly fine tool, but they should not be used when you're being evaluated on your ability to do arithmetics.
Abacuses all the way.
I prefer to hire my own personal computer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
What's her name ?
I sold out and contracted the work to Texas Instruments
If I used a calculator on a maths test I should only be penalised if the rules stated no calculators.
LLMs are certainly trained without consent, but they exist to spot common patterns. It's only likely to plagiarise if that text is also similar to lots of other text.
In fact, the academic practice of references and exact quotes has actually increased the tendency of statistical models to "plagiarise".
LLM will continue to be a useful academic tool. We just have to learn how best to incorporate them into our testing.
After reading that the exam rules basically said not to use chatgpt or similar, I completely agree.
It's not really a calculator because it gives different answers. Newer moldels can give attribution (e.g. bing copilot).
My opinion is that LLMs are not going to go away. Testing needs to adapt to focus on the human element. Marks are no longer lost for bad handwriting.
Mostly Agreed. I think the "in your own words" part will be debated strongly over the next few years. Will proof of writing your own prompt be sufficient?
Do you think you should be penalised if you got ChatGPT to sit the math test for you?
No, you'd be penalising yourself (except if you got the wolfram alpha plugin working).
Professors should be setting exams that chatgpt can't hope to solve.
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.
At college level, the question setter should ensure they are testing something where this is not possible.
How the fuck are they going to prove IN COURT with court standards of proof that his work was actually by AI…
He already admitted to using AI