Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI The parents of a Massachusetts child are taking his school to court after the student was punished for using AI in a class project. The individual, named only as RNH, admitted to teachers that they had used AI when writing a Social Studies project in December, but claimed it was only for research and not to write the whole …
My other half's favourite. (She was a teacher, now happily retired.)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cd/76/e8/cd76e8d776a8b9c11e3bb42f28361fb4.jpg
he sounds like top manglement material so he'll probably go far in any case
My experience of 'Top Manglement' is that the successful* ones are excellent at never being held to account for their mistakes. Never getting caught is essential for bullies, idiots and the 'entitled elite incompetents' to get to the top.
*Successful = getting bonuses, promotions, rewards, and recognised for (other people's) good works and successes.
What I like to term "just another entitled c*nt". The rules were clear, you broke them now suffer the consequences.
I know of a case where a primary school child has constant terrible behaviour and the parents have expressed zero interest throughout the years in doing anything about it resulting in repeated entries on the education department's system noting said behaviour and the lack of action by the parents. Roll forward a few years and they wish to enrol the little tosser in an elite private school that will perform vetting before offering a place, resulting in them hassling his current school to clean up his record (too late, you can add but not delete) and give him a good reference.
Classic example of parents not giving a sh*t until it affects them, never mind all the students whose learning was interrupted by the little shit or the teachers at their wits end dealing with problems the parents should address. F*ck them and the horse they rode in on is my view.
Such true commentary here.
I volunteer some time in a youth organisation and I have troublesome individuals, they can be disruptive and cause everyone else to miss out on the various experiences, as you end up spending more time dealing with child driven BS, than delivering the organisation's goals.
Much like your post here, I have some parents who aren't interested in the shite behaviour, mainly because the little shite is not at home and they are having some peace and quiet!
Parental responsibility seems to be a thing of the past!
"The rules were clear, you broke them now suffer the consequences."
From the article: "Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states."
Does that make it clear? Does that include not using AI assisted search engines, which most are now? How do you know if the results you get are not AI generated or assisted? There seems to be a fairly blanket ban an any use of AI in class/home-work and lots of wiggle room for legal challenges, not least of which is the definition an an "AI tool". I'm not sure from the article how much "AI assist" the student had, but any work involving research is supposed to result in the student writing out in their own words what they think using the results of the research, wherever that research came from. Since it was a Social Studies paper, maybe references and examples of AI was relevant? We don't know that yet. The student might have thought it a valid point and why they admitted it rather than denying it :-)
Exactly... these are just a bunch of jumped up, small minded prigs in here. Low intellect, authority whipped tools. I said something similar. that one should be able to use AI to find sources of information, but then those sources need to be credited and footnoted like any other. They wouldn't have even known.
I find research papers using search engines. One could also use AI themselves to find information on the Internet.
< "...one should be able to use AI to find sources of information, but then those sources need to be credited and footnoted like any other. They wouldn't have even known."
Likely true. But they did know, because that's not what this student was doing. They flat out admitted to copying and pasting AI output into their work with no citation. They knew they were breaking rules.
>Does that make it clear?
Yes, its pen and paper and real books, log tables, sliderule, pocket calculator
Given the breadth of "AI", just opening a web browser will most probably involve the use of AI and as for a web search...
Not saying the school is wrong, just that their rule is not actually saying what they think it is saying.
We had a little bellend who was the class clown, messed about, screwed around and didn't bother coming in for his GCSEs. He left school, did a series of shitty low paid jobs for 10 years, got married, manage to produce two kids and dropped dead suddenly at the age of 38 from a drug induced heart attack.
I don't wish death on anyone, but life is always a case of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes".
Doesn't sound like they cheated. It sounds like they used AI similar to wikipedia to establish some baseline information and sources that they could later use. This is a perfectly functional example of using AI like a search engine. The article clearly articulates that the student didn't cite any of the output of the AI, nor did they quote it. Get off your high horse. I use AI to do this stuff all the time: "What was the name of the vice president for Taft", which then tells me "James S. Sherman", which is a name I can then look up any books on Sherman, which there are none. Which might point me back to ChatGPT, which tells me that it knows of no biographies either but that it can recommend some books I can read about the Taft administration or Vice Presidents in general.
If I was writing a professional paper, there is no way I would cite chatGPT, since I'd probably be sourcing my paper from "The Life and Times of William Howard Taft".
I dont know of any citation style where you mention search engines or research aides in the footnotes. I dont mention that I used a thesaurus, a dictionary, and google when writing a professional paper. How is ChatGPT any different?
Using AI, which is know to halluzinate and return wrong answers, is clearly the way to do any kind of research. Much like Wikipedia - several things are pretty good, other things are written by people with no clue or those trying to push their version of the story. And no, you just cannot correct the pages, as the old state will be restored within a short period of time.
You could read the defence:
"This lawsuit is not about the expulsion, or even the suspension, of a high school student.
Instead, the dispute concerns a student, RNH, dissatisfied with a letter grade in AP US History
class, having to attend a “Saturday” detention, and his deferral from NHS - rudimentary student
discipline administered for an academic integrity violation. RNH was given relatively lenient and
measured discipline for a serious infraction, using Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) on a project,
amounting to something well less than a suspension."
"Despite accepting the discipline, acknowledging its legitimacy and not appealing the
discipline to the Superintendent, RNH and his parents now asks the Court to grant extraordinary
relief"
And it says that AI was used to draft and edit the submission.
"The article clearly articulates that the student didn't cite any of the output of the AI, nor did they quote it."
Please re-read the article again:
"RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so," the school argues."
Thank you.
> "RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts
This is a good example of the dangers of using AI: clearly the kid was unable to comprehend what the AI was telling him in order to be able to re-phrase it - so he simply parroted it. And he will do the same in later life. As will other users of AI.
I'll disagree with you on your second point.
When I was in college, I frequently used Wikipedia as what it is, an encyclopedia.
I could not cite an encyclopedia[0], because it is not a first-hand account. It is a third-hand account of first-hand information gathered, sorted and collated.
I frequently recall using it's citations to go to the source material, gather what I needed and cite that. It made easy work, at least for me, in finding first-hand information on some random topic which I hadn't been familiar with.
[0] - I haven't had to cite anything since college. I'm sure you can cite encyclopedias. My instructors' rules were that we could only use first-hand sources, which an encyclopedia is not.
Wikipedia is an unacceptable source for academic writing because it is wholly unreliable. The Wikipedian cultists so edit it have a standard procedure:
1. Decide what conclusions you wish to draw.
2. Find external sources which support these conclusions.
3. Reverse any edits which use different sources to support different conclusions.
4. Move on to another topic on which you have limited knowledge but strong opinions.
It's not even useful as a source of references because these have been ruthlessly pruned to support one conclusion.
That's not too deny its entertainment value. One can have many happy hours reading up on - say - left wing political parties, as long as you remember that nothing you read can be relied on.
Wikipedia is bloody useless. You cannot rely on it.
Example 1: a few years ago the United States team was, unbelievably, advancing in the World Cup. This was mostly because they had a very good goalie. The sports press in the US started calling him the Secretary of Defense. So one bright lad went to the Wiki entry for the actual SecDef and modified it to feature the goalie’s name and picture. Wiki de-modified it; it was changed back. This was repeated several times until Wiki locked the article.
Example 2: if you can read another language, check out the Wiki articles on various subjects in the second language. For reasons unclear, the Wiki articles in English and German for African Wild Dogs (a.k.a. Pianted Wolves) are markedly different; one article is about three times the size of the other. This is repeated several times. And, of course, the articles on Operation Chastise and Operation Chariot are rather different. Gee. I wonder why. In any case, there is often disagreement about what would seem to be basic facts; apparently Painted Wolves behave in markedly different ways if observed by English speakers from how they behave if seen by German speakers. (Yes, I noticed because I am, after all, a Fan of Wolves... I _like_ Lycaon pictus.)
Example 3: Wiki is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, at any time. Have a look at articles for obscure events, then check the edit log. For example, look at the Battle of the Sunda Strait. This was a minor battle in Feb 1942 between the allies and the Japanese; there was one American heavy cruiser, one Australian light cruiser, one Dutch destroyer, vs five Japanese cruisers and a dozen destoyers, some mine warfare vessels, a seaplane tender, a small aircraft carrier, and 58 troopships. The allies got thumped, of course, mostly by the best torpedo of the war the Japanese 24" Long Lance. Indeed, the Long Lance was too good, the only major Japanese casualties were friendly fire with Long Lances, including a mine warfare vessel and four troopships, including the ship carrying the general commanding the landing force, who was not pleased. People still care about this; as of the last time I checked, there had been edits up to the 18th of September this year. Seriously, someone is fucking around with this article _still_. If you look at something more controversial you'll see a _lot_ of edits.
You cannot trust Wiki. Use only where it's not important. And verify elsewhere.
I teach a University class on writing for STEM. I tell my students that Wikipedia can be an introduction to a topic just like any encyclopedia, but they can't cite it. They have to follow the links to the source articles. It can also give them good search terms for using in journal databases.
I have shown them.in class how to brainstorm with CoPilot. It can limk to peer reviewed sources (mostly open access). I also intentionally show my students that it can be wrong ("How many 'r's are there in 'strawberry?') so they understand the importance of fact checking.
In classes in my department, students may use AI up to the point of creating an outline. Once they start creating content it has to be their own words.
I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a crucial distinction here. The school had a clear policy prohibiting the use of AI tools for assignments unless explicitly allowed. Unlike using a dictionary or a thesaurus, which are standard reference tools, AI can generate content that blurs the line between original work and machine-generated text.
Also, search engines direct you to sources that you can verify and cite, while AI like ChatGPT can produce information that isn’t always accurate or easily traceable. In academic settings, it’s important to follow the established rules to ensure fairness. The issue isn’t just about using a tool for research; it’s about adhering to the guidelines that were set and agreed upon.
Doesn't sound like they cheated.
Clear breach of trust and ethical standards. It doesn't matter whether he submitted an AI-written essay, an AI-written essay that he had fully rewritten in his own voice, nor simply used AI as an occasionally-hallucagenic research tool (and indeed, even a tool like Google can be considered to have AI components today, making it hard to escape).
Nonetheless, he - and every other student - had been fully informed of the school policy:
Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states.
They boke policy and wilfully commited a disciplinary offence. QED. It doesn't matter if you disagree with it - you've been told not to, and you've been caught at it.
And I might take a minute to listen to their argument if they were claiming that the policy in itself was flawed, over-simplistic or in some way unfair (because let's face it, there's a not-unreasonable moral panic about this stuff and not every policy will be well drafted). But they're not - they're asking for special treatment having accepted that the kid got caught breaking the rules fair and square.
Mate, I understand the point you're trying to make, but it certainly doesn't apply in this case.
"The article clearly articulates that the student didn't cite any of the output of the AI, nor did they quote it."
It jolly well doesn't, because I suspect that the author actually read some of the court papers cited.
The student admitted to using ChatGPT and Grammerly.
"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 explained his process for generating his script and described the specific prompt that he put into the chat bot."
"Hoey indicated that much of the research notes and first draft script were generated with AI technology and passed off as RNH’s own."
The student and parents also didn't appeal the decision with the school, which would have been the normal course of action.
The student had also been on a course specifically about correct essay technique, including using and citing AI.
> don't make things up, nor do they write the paper for you
So you didn't bother reading the article: it was only for research and not to write the whole paper
AI is a tool, much like a pen, hence the little story. Times change. Progress happens. Stay stuck in the twentieth century if you wish. But don't expect everyone else to do so.
People keep saying this. The inclusion of the word "research" does not remove the other words. The article and court filings all indicate that some amount of AI-generated text was included verbatim in drafts and included edited in later work. How much of the essay was made up of that is unclear, and likely the student doesn't know either. Your assertion that it didn't happen has been directly contradicted repeatedly.
Those cases have no relation to one another. However, if I try, I am not on your side. If your school mandated fountain pen and informed you that other methods of writing were going to result in a penalty, then you have some good options:
1. Write in fountain pen.
2. Argue that, although they're asking you to write in fountain pen in order to train you to have good handwriting with them, ballpoint pens are going to be common enough that you don't need that skill, and therefore their policy should be changed.
3. Argue that, although you were told to write in fountain pen for handwriting, this course is not related to handwriting and a different form should be acceptable, and therefore their policy should be changed.
And some bad ones:
4. Write in your preferred method without permission and without attempting to argue otherwise, then act surprised when they do what they said they would do.
5. After receiving your penalty, demand that they refrain from enforcing their clear rules, not because you're arguing the rules are unfair, but because you don't like the consequences.
If you want to try an option 2 or 3 argument on AI, you can. We'll all listen and decide whether we were wrong and AI use is more acceptable than we thought. So far, you haven't, and nor have this student or his parents. They've gone for option 5, and you've chosen option 6: make up irrelevant analogies and pretend they apply when they clearly don't and form a coherent 2/3 argument in favor of something.
The school rules do seem clear on the matter - no AI unless explicitly authorised. The issue is whether the child's use could be investigated more and the school take a more generous line, but then they could be sued by the parents of the other pupils in the class who were disadvantaged by not using AI.
Who would be a school-teacher these days?
"Recommend they all sit down in a circle and sing "Kumbaya"?"
To be fair, that seems to be the methodology that they teach human teachers at modern teaching schools ... Followed immediately by giving the brats a participation trophy, and asking them if they want a do-over.
I take it you did not like school !!!
Teaching a group of children that are a mix of the motivated and the disinterested is *very* hard ... No AI [cough spit] would have a chance, not to mention the school would be liable for teaching 'Hallucinationary facts' and therefore disadvantaging *ALL* the children to pick up the popular theme !!!
Grow up and learn just how useless AI currently is ... it *may* work in very narrow fields of knowledge if the AI[cough spit] is custom built just for the specific field of knowledge but generally hallucination is the No. 1 problem with no current solution !!!
:)
to mention the school would be liable for teaching 'Hallucinationary facts'
Does that include schools teaching that the Earth is ~6000 years old, dinosaurs and humans were contemporaries and that $something is guiding evolution (assuming they even allow the word "evolution" in their curriculum?
learn just how useless AI currently is
I think I've come up with a use for "AI" as it is now. The "AI" players in games like Civilisation are crap, just complex weighted decision trees. An "AI" trained on a few thousand games to start it off, and then have it learn while playing so you can't hit on a successful strategy and stick to it. If done well it'd force a player to continually develop their strategies which would extend a games life significantly.
An interesting side effect would be that every copy of the game would have a slightly different "AI", unless they had it call the mothership to amalgamate them all which I think would be a mistake but one I suspect they would be unable to resist.
Well the article was written this way:
Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states.
I presume that the quoted part is from the manual and the two words preceding and three words following it are the author's words.
Digging a bit more at the linked court filing (starting at PDF page 5), it states in an ordered list:
Students shall:
* Not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed. Blah blah blah....
* More points listed.
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"Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states.
Whether you use it as a Search Engine, or to write the actual paper is irrelevant if the school policy is essentially "Do not use AI for anything" (see above).
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Take a calculator to early mathematics classes and see how quickly they take it away. Take a more advanced calculator to classes and they'll require you to downgrade. Take an unapproved calculator to tests and they'll disqualify you. Education and testing are performed under constraints. If you deliberately violate them, that's called cheating. If you think the constraints are bad, then you can try to change them, but if you act like they don't apply because you don't like them, you'll quickly discover how much your opinion affects what the rules say.
"
Re: “gain advantage”
Over whom? Surely school papers are scored objectively.
Once you weren’t allowed to use calculators.
Then you were."
It's not always over somebody else, but if you can move a B+ body of work to an A and become Valedictorian, that looks really good to colleges.
Most of my maths classes in school did not allow the use of calculators, smart-ass me asked if I could use a slide rule. The teacher said I could which made me sit down and learn to use a slide rule. In chemistry and physics class, calculators were mandatory. This was that due to a focus on the science more than the tools (maths). The teachers didn't want wrong answers from shoddy arithmetic.
If calculators are allowed in maths classes now, that's a shame. School is where you need to get a lot of things shoved into memory so you understand them, not just long enough to regurgitate them on a test. I'd see all sorts of crazy stuff interns would do when I was in aerospace. They could run the newest programs but couldn't spot that their answers were far off the mark due to some error that should have been obvious. That was telling me they learned the basics of the tools, but didn't understand the underlying concepts. They also had no idea about error bars, standard materials, fastener call-outs or what the difference was between stick, MiG and TiG welding.
A welder is a TRUE WELDER when they can "Stack Dimes" AND "Be Utterly Smooth" in their welds! And that is from EXPERIENCE! I can make super smooth welds (i.e. Aluminum, Titanium, Stainless Steel, Maraging Steels and other exotic metals that are HARD to weld!) AND I can "Stack Dimes" that look pretty! They key issue is that you MUST Sonogram and/or X-RAY your welds to make sure they can handle the design stress the engineer puts in their plans.
My current hobby project is a proper 1800 PSI maximum pressure vessel 2 metres in diameter and 15 metres long to hold 600 PSI worth of Propane for my off-grid home which will be constructed sometime next year. All my welds will be perfectly smooth with a proper X-RAY inspection to entire longevity and meet all pressure vessel statutes. At 1800 PSI maximum design hold pressure at the vessel diameter I need, means the vessel walls be be a minimum two inches thick (5 cm) of high-end 316-series Stainless Steel with an extra anti-corrosion glass-like interior and exterior coating to ensure NO Hydrogen Embrittlement takes place!
That amount of stored-at-600 PSI propane is over 180,000 litres equivalent worth of household propane when used at normal 20 lbs BBQ tank pressure which will last me over 20 years for full off-grid heating, cooking and electrical generation use when I fill it up! I will NEVER need any on-grid electricity or heating from ANY 3rd party provider!
V
"Once you weren’t allowed to use calculators.
Then you were.
...
If calculators are allowed in maths classes now, that's a shame."
Perspective from the UK here but I was at school many many years back and we were allowed to use calculators then - for some things.
Wind forward to today and it seems little different - my kids are sometimes allowed to use calculators, sometimes not. Looking at their homework, it's obvious why they are or are not allowed a calculator for certain work. Learning long division for example, not allowed a calculator. Learning a particular technique where the final numerical calculation isn't the actual learning objective, free to use a calculator.
It's all about the situation, rather than any blanket ban or permission.
"Perspective from the UK here but I was at school many many years back and we were allowed to use calculators then - for some things."
Some things never change really - the problem schools had in the early-mid 1980s was that calculators were becoming available which could draw graphs and store formulae. As such you were permitted to use them for general classwork but you could only use them under exam conditions if the calculator could be reset to factory settings (or similar). You could tell who the rich kids* were during "O" grades and highers as they were the ones waiting in a queue at the door for the invigilator to reset or confiscate their calculators.
*some of these calculators cost more than the average weekly wage back then.
Learning long division for example, not allowed a calculator.
It beats me why anyone is taught long division nowadays. It has been a completely redundant skill since calculators became affordable, and the only time it is of actual use - division of polynomials by polynomials - is needed by hardly anyone and easily learned by those who actually do need it. We might as well insist that children learn how to use Napier's bones.
"It's all about the situation, rather than any blanket ban or permission."
I think it's still a good skill to be able to lay out a problem and do it "long hand". I'm a very visual learner so I've made endless numbers of scribbles on pieces of wood while figuring out angles and stuff. I could do that faster than I could fetch a calculator (that worked). The rest of the time I have calculators all over so they are in easy reach in the places where I use them the most.
There is a use for calculators , including spreadsheets with 12 significant figures, and there is a use for slide rules with 3 significant figures. However in slide rule use you must know the approximate answer to get the decimal place in the right place, so mental arithmetic is also involved.
calculators are allowed in maths classes now, that's a shame.
Mathematics is not the same as arithmetic.
If a pocket calculator is giving you an advantage in a mathematics class or exam, then I don't rate that course or qualification.
Mathematics is algebra, geometry, calculus and the rest. Unless your pocket calculator has a symbolic evaluation engine built-in, it's not going to give you an advantage with any of these.
I got very good grades in mathematics at school and college (without a calculator as it happens although it wouldn't have made any difference) and use maths all the time for work (electronics, closed loop, transducers, comms, etc.).
I'm rubbish at arithmetic - never even learned my times tables!
"Mathematics is not the same as arithmetic"
This is why my (home educated) kids did IGCSE Maths (designed for use abroad, but also popular with independent schools) rather than GCSE. There was no no-calculator paper and I thought it a waste of time.
They did learn some times tables and stuff while they were at school, but once I took them out I did not bother with things like long division. It did not stop the older one getting A* in maths A level and an A in further maths.
Open University maths uses computer algebra (Maxima) from the start, because all professional mathematicians use CA. It gives no more advantage than a calculator and for the same reason: if you don't understand the question it won't help with the answer and if you do understand the question it only eliminates silly mistakes which have nothing to do with mathematical understanding.
Professional mathematician speaking. I _very_ rarely use computer algebra software (for a moment there I thought you were talking about cellular automota :-/), the occasional exception being a (definite or indefinite) integral I'm too lazy to hack out myself (and because integration is usually heuristic voodoo).
This is mostly because I have very little use for CA software - generally the systems don't seem to be oriented towards the type of problem I'm likely to find myself working on - and also because working through a derivation yourself is the best way to really understand what's going on.
Correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was that the idea behind making students write a paper is to see if they're absorbing the material and how they infuse it with their own thinking.
In essence using ChatGPT for a paper is like memorizing the eye chart prior to your opthalmologist appointment to pass the eye exam.
Sure, in a pure gamesmanship sense, you have found a technically optimal solution but you've defeated the purpose of the exercise because it's not designed as an optimization puzzle but more of a diagnostic/benchmarking test.
(This also ignores the fact that math classes will force you to do calculations by hand so you grasp the concepts before turning you loose to mash the buttons with funny pictures on them.)
Hmm, so the little bugger cheated and got caught. Hardly unique - according to a friend's daughter, pretty much all her mates use chatgpt to "help" with their homework. That said, it seems like RNH and colleagues have been explicitly told not to use AI tools. Clearly, he hasn't got a leg to stand on, though, if the impact is as extensive as the parents claim, one might hope that the school could be a little more understanding. There again, that isn't really fair on the other kids, who either followed the rules or were smart enough to not get caught.
Unfortunately, AI tools are here to stay, and the future will belong to people who leverage them effectively. You could argue that using them shows initiative and familiarity with the available tools. You could also argue that, in this case, it shows dishonesty, a disregard for the rules and a willingness to use any means to get ahead - attributes that, unfortunately, probably mean he will go far in just about any industry. Not someone I'd be comfortable trusting, though. I'm afraid I have to agree with the school in this case - actions have consequences.
The "impact" of this is being made considerably worse by the parents, who have now by their actions ensured that any web search for the kid's name will forever return results about his cheating and using AI against the rules.
Have they never heard of the Streisand Effect? Did no-one take them quietly to one side and say "look, no matter how you feel about this, the school acted within their own rules, and by screaming & ranting about this you're just going to make it worse and make a mountain out of a molehill"?
Did no-one take them quietly to one side and say "look, no matter how you feel about this, the school acted within their own rules, and by screaming & ranting about this you're just going to make it worse and make a mountain out of a molehill"?
You can't tell Tyler and Tiffany anything...
I don't think the parents really give a shit and that's the great shame of it.
By suing the school instead of doing literally anything else they show where their priorities lay: pop out a kid, don't starve or beat it, but beyond that let it amble through life any old way so long as it doesn't make His Queen and Her King look too bad.
I dont see how this is "Cheating"
The student was told :not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed
The student didnt do their work with AI tools. They were rather explicit, they merely used AI to look something up. The only fault of the student is admitting that they typed a query related to their paper into chatGPT.
You keep saying this, and you're wrong on several different levels. Starting with the facts, you allege that AI was only used for research. Is that even true? The school's motion suggests it was a bit more than that:
Incredibly, RNH and his parents contend that using AI to draft, edit and research content for an AP US History project, all while not citing to use of AI in the project, is not an “act of dishonesty,” “use of unauthorized technology” or plagiarism
How do you know it was not also used to write some of the paper, whether it was later rephrased or not?
But even if you were right, do you see something in the rules that says "AI shall not be used unless you're using it as a search engine, then you're fine"? I don't see that. So maybe it's the other way and it says "AI is forbidden only for the following purposes" and those purposes don't include searching? Do you see that? I see a global ban on the technology unless it's authorized, which the school indicates they did not do.
< "The student didnt do their work with AI tools. They were rather explicit, they merely used AI to look something up."
Explicit? Are you an AI bot? I ask because you seem to be halucinating. Nothing resembling your claim is in the article, and if you read the documents in the links provided in the article, they do explicitly say that the student admitted to copying and pasting results from the AI tool directly into their work. Also, the school policy (also in the linked documents) clearly forbids ANY use of AI tools without prior permission from the instructor.
"one might hope that the school could be a little more understanding"
When I was in school, plagiarizing work could earn you a grade of -100% (that's right, NEGATIVE 100%, not 0%) and possibly larger consequences. I'd say a Saturday suspension and a poor grade on the assignment is being exceptionally lenient.
Maybe the school could, in response to the lawsuit, have an outside group examine the paper and the school rules and regrade it appropriately... like -100% for plagiarism.
(Is using spellcheck to spell plagiarism correctly plagiarism? Oops. https://xkcd.com/2885/ )
"Hmm, so the little bugger cheated and got caught. Hardly unique - according to a friend's daughter, pretty much all her mates use chatgpt to "help" with their homework. "
In college, I used purchased reports from ads in back of magazines for some of my papers. I didn't hand them in wholesale and usually used them for an outline and bibliography. Today it's dead easy to find source material, but back in the bronze age, it could take ages to find books that might be useful. If the kid used AI to get a book list, I'd say no more, but going beyond that seems to be the intention of the ban. I'm assuming that finding the source materials wasn't a key piece of the assignment.
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Well, after this, who'll ever dare say again that LLMs are useless crapola, hey?! They're a cheater's bees' knees, a fraudster's genie bottle, a crook's snake charming flute! They're super-duper at democratizing high-scores for homework and tests, without the need to threaten smart kids with grave bodily harm to obtain a copy of theirs, for dumb plagiarism, mostly verbatim -- and, most importantly, without the need to study, or understand anything at all really, ever! The earth can remain as comfortably flat as needed ... no ripples in space-time, no confusing geometryzes, and no bloody complex numbers!
Now everyone can appear to be a high-achieving genius (from the outside) thanks to this new tech, and even your own kids! It's magic, illusionism, and frees their time so they can experiment with funny smoke, party tricks, and text-to-booze instead, as they should! And (bonus!) we used to have to pay for this kind of "service" on the web, in the old days, but now it's free as in free beer! In no time flat we'll be able to replace pedagogy with demagogy, at huge cost savings (except for calluses)! What's not to like?!
Minor caveat though, if I were D. and J. Harris, as parents of RNH, I would have hired an AI lawyer right off the bat ... it would have come up with better nonsense than "suffer irreparable harm that is imminent" in this case where the kid did this wrong thing at exactly the wrong time for the "highly competitive admissions process"! My AI lawyer would have instead claimed that the school held the kid tied in barbed wire, in an undergound dungeon, without food or water, mercilessly caning him/her, day in and day out, for weeks, until he/she was but a pale shadow of his/her former self ... (like we used to in the old days!). (gnak, gnak, gnak!)
I might have missed a cue.
What references are you using that correctly state that the majority (of founding fathers) were born in colonial north america, but incorrectly state that they *didn't* have a plurality of common law-trained lawyers in their ranks? The majority of sources I find say it was actually almost half?
Ignoring all that fact-bothering above, it was intended as a jocular statement, in the vein of: " 'WE LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU' ha-ha".
In the early 90s, about 93, last year of school and 6th form. Managed to get a C in English lang and lit. What helped me? A Just William story that I may or may not have plagerised. Changed the names, changed the story a bit. But I essentially took the whole idea of one of the stories and submitted it as my final short story assignment. Luckily, no one noticed. Maybe I'd changed it enough to be classed as "transformative".
Maybe the interviewee was North Korean?
Interestingly, our company just took on a security consultancy firm also named in that article for "accidentality" doing the same thing :-)
I was interviewing one from the Indian sub-continent. It was obvious he had answers posted all around his screen or on the wall behind as I could see him scanning through them before he answered. I found out they were Post-It-Pad type notes when one fell across the camera! We didn't go any further.
The skills being demonstrated are the ability to lie & the ability to not accept being in the wrong when caught.
Remind you of anyone ???
Therefore the kid has a future as a Real Estate Sales drone, Presidential wannabe/wackjob or Rightwing Messiah !!!
No need to go to a private school ... just lie about it & use AI[cough spit] to fake the approriate documents etc. [Seems to be quite good at it]
:)
Same freakout as calculators. People who learn how to PROPERLY use AI to their advantage will be able to do so much more in life than those that don't.
Are students with Word allowed to use its AI based spelling and grammar checker? What about Grammarly? Where is the line? Are students with English professor parents forbidden from requesting their assistance? How is it fair that some children have involved parents who are able to assist their kids, but others do not? My mom is fluent in German, I used to have her spell and grammar check my German homework in High School. Was that cheating, or was it making effective use of the tools I had at my disposal?
My employer has a very strict policy on AI usage. No code or company data at all on web based AI. Any code written by any AI must be reviewed by a human with experience with the code ase and language in question prior to being implemented. We have an internal LLM that can be used for any of the above, or we can used a web based LLM of our choice for non-sensitve data related purposes (self, and employee reviews, email composure, presentation visuals, etc.). I would hire someone who I could tell used AI to write an effective and factually correct cover letter or resume over someone who didn't, because they are much more likely to be able to do their job quickly and efficiently, and I would know they can use them effectively.
Schools need to be teaching AI, not prohibiting it. Foreign schools are going to be doing so. If we want our children to have the same advantages, we need to be teaching this. Or we could let our entire country be held back by boomers who are scared of being left behind because of technology they don't understand
This is a piece of work intended to show the student's understanding and/or creative abilities. Their own.
A calculator stops me needing to look up trig tables. It'll do a multiplication for me. It doesn't tell me the method with which to solve the problem, but an AI would. This is a pretty well established line, with graphing calculators being banned because they commonly let students lean on pre-made calculators or equation re-arranging or the like.
Your mum correcting your German homework is absolutely a cheat. The work you're turning in isn't an accurate reflection of your understanding. But if you ask her what the correct spelling is, that's making use of resources available to you. With the second example you recognise a shortcoming and fix it- it's a learning experience.
Spelling and Grammar checkers are absolutely a cheat in language work, because the work submitted isn't based on your understanding. Grammarly is even more of a cheat on language work. On non-language-work a different standard can be applied- spell-checking a Chemistry paper could be okay, because what's being assessed is the student's understanding of Chemistry rather than English.
In sports, if I turned up to a Shot-put with a cannon then claimed a win because mine went further I'd be considered a cheat, and for exactly the same reason- it's not me competing, it's Big Bertha. But if I delivered a Physics paper by cannon, it wouldn't invalidate the Physics paper because that's not evaluated based on how far you threw it. Though it would probably raise a few eyebrows.
Schools (and universities etc) should examine the students and their abilities.
"On non-language-work a different standard can be applied- spell-checking a Chemistry paper could be okay, because what's being assessed is the student's understanding of Chemistry rather than English."
OTOH, you better know if "nitrite" or "nitrate" is the proper term and a spelling checker or autocorrect is messing you up. The one place I find spell checking to be poor is when it comes to technical words. Grammar checkers can fall down when it comes to things such as legal writing. It's very important to not have a grammar checker changing what you write since there can be certain accepted phrasing that doesn't follow "the rules". The same can go for many other professional writing in medical and scientific fields.
"Schools need to be teaching AI, not prohibiting it. Foreign schools are going to be doing so."
I beg to differ. In school, kids need to learn, really learn, the underlying concepts. Just working some AI tools and parroting the results isn't going to work. The problem with teaching spanking new technologies in school is that by the time the kids enter the workplace, all of that instruction is likely outdated. What doesn't go obsolete is language skills, maths/arithmetic, history, civics and science.
I didn't take classes to learn Quickbooks, I took classes to learn proper bookkeeping. I've taken classes for software such as Solidworks, but it was the only way to learn 3D CAD as there were no courses that were brand neutral. I still use Solidworks, but I've made the effort to learn things in terms of concepts so if I were ever to take a job with a company using another program, it would just be a matter of learning where things were in the menus and what the icons represent since the vast majority of those programs operate in a very similar manner. What really set me up well was manual drafting classes in school. My drafting table is folded up in the garage, but if I ever have the space, I'll get it up since I enjoy the process and some things are easier to do manually at least initially. I still have large drawings of stage plots/lighting plans I did way back in the 80's that I need to get framed.
First what was the school's policy on AI use and was it widely publicised / clear.
In general punishment / discipline / treatment is schools is insane; either not enough in some respects or overbearing in others subject to the wokeness DEIness and idiotic, fake "liberalness".
Also, considering many search engines are using AI how are kids supposed to reasearch not using it? Did the school spell out exactly what methods of research were permitted and perhaps how to avoid AI if online.
All said kids should not be using AI to write their response. Schools should look at how they deal with this - perhaps a nice return to books and written responses? Research in libraries and mandatory citations or references in the responses? Oh but that might be more work for teachers, which would mean more teachers as they are already overloaded.
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It’s a tough situation. On one hand, academic integrity is essential, and students should be clear about what is and isn’t allowed. On the other hand, AI is becoming an integral tool in education and the workplace. Instead of punishing students for using it, perhaps schools should focus on teaching how to use AI responsibly and ethically.
Punishing a student so severely for using AI as a research aid does feel like an overreaction. Education should evolve with technology, not fight against it. Guiding students on proper AI usage might be a more productive approach than litigation and strict penalties.
Having said that, while I understand the potential benefits of using AI tools, the student knowingly broke the school’s fairly clear policy. Making exceptions would be unfair to the other students who followed the rules and completed their work without using an AI. Rules are in place to ensure a level playing field, and part of education is learning to abide by them.
Perhaps it’s time for schools to revisit and update their policies to reflect new technologies like AI. But until then, fairness means everyone should play by the same rules. Accountability is an important lesson; overlooking this would send the wrong message.
I teach ‘computer stuff’ at a fine local 3try educational institution Everyone who teaches ‘computer stuff’ gets lumbered with at least one very low-level class, because someone has to teach them. Last month I got a notification from Administration (the, ahem, Dean of Students) that one young gentleman was appealing his grade from last year December. Yes, he waited until this year September. Gee. Perhaps he thought that I might no longer have access to certain information. He was wrong. The school used to give adjuncts 512 GB allocations on the main server, later increased to 1 TB and then 2 TB of OneDrive space. Excel files and even Word files and PDFs ain’t that big. I have files dating back to 2009. Turns out that m’boy managed to fail a class I had previously thought was impossible to fail: intro to computers, a.k.a ‘this is a computer’ and ‘this is Microsoft Office’, stuff normally covered in high school at the latest, the lowest of the low-level ‘computer stuff’ classes. In the past, exceptionally bad students might get a C. He flat-out failed. Why? He didn’t do the Word, Excel, or PowerPoint tests, and he got 42% on the final. No-one else got less than 70%. I sent a copy of the class workbook, with all the marks for all the students for all tests, projects, etc., to Admin. They denied his grade appeal. His parents showed up at the Dean’s office. They kept on trying to have the decision overturned, even after being shown a view (redacted, revealing just his grades, and that only after the Dean was confident that they were authorized, thanks to FERPA; the Feds get annoyed if those not authorized see student grades) of the workbook. The Dean told them to take a hike. They left, promising lawyers. We’ll see…
M’boy wanted to get into another computer class: networks. Laddie, if you can’t handle Excel and PowerPoint you’re gonna have a fun time with TCP/IP. He ain’t getting into real computer classes until he passes intro, and it had better be better than a bare pass or he won’t be let in. Who knew that vegging out and not doing basic work would be career-limiting? Exactly how he escaped high school without knowing this stuff is left as an exercise for the student. I suspect that I know. He ain’t getting a pass from me. Nope. Not happening.
"Exactly how he escaped high school without knowing this stuff is left as an exercise for the student. I suspect that I know."
There are enough stories in the US about kids getting a high school diploma that only showed up at school a few days a month (they got a date with a girl/boy that did go to school). Grading criteria gets lowered so the pass/fail ratio hits a certain number. Part of this is a "no child left behind" attitude that only reinforces poor behavior. Nothing new here. Heinlein used it in "Friday" where California awarded a bachelors degree to anybody with a high school diploma since people with a bachelors earned more than somebody with only a high school diploma. Further legislation was being voted on to make it retroactive. Problem solving, politician style. California is still at it. They've jacked up the minimum wage for employees at fast food restaurants since people working there couldn't make a living wage to raise a family on. Will RAH's comedic dig at California come to pass one day?
I hope the judge awards serious cash to the school for bringing a frivolous case.
'Irreparable harm' is having your knee destroyed by school bullies with a cricket bat. Not a grade reduction.
It's school. One grade on one paper is nothing. Nobody gives two shits about what you did in school when you are at uni. Those exams you sweated for mean nothing when you go up to the next level. In the UK there are three: school, sixth form and uni. Even your A Levels, which require real work, are ignored at Uni.
Then, in work, how tremendous that you have a degree that cost you a mountain of debt. You can forget all of that now. Here is your professional training manual. Learn it by Thursday.
Absolutely true. I'm in the US, so using the US terms:
Your high school grades matter when getting into college. After that, nobody cares.
Your college grades matter when getting your degree and (possibly) your first job in your profession. After that, nobody cares.
The existence of your degree matters for the rest of your career.
Related joke: What do you call a doctor who graduated last in their class?
Answer: Doctor.
Related joke: What do you call a doctor who graduated last in their class?
Answer: Doctor.
Not sure how it works in the US, but medical career advancement usually means that after spending years of hard work to be called "doctor", the career path upwards to consultants involving more years of hard work and experience means becoming "Mr/Mrs/Ms". So yeah, based on that joke, the plodders[*] and almost fails get to stay as "doctor".
* and yes, I know, still being "doctor" mostly means not all doctors can advance upwards for many reasons, not least of which may be that they enjoy their job and don't want to move up the ladder.
> I hope the judge awards serious cash to the school for bringing a frivolous case.
I'm hoping the other students in his class will find some way to bring a lawsuit of their own against the kid and/or his parents for the disruption caused. If they group together then it would be a ... class action.
<badum tish>
My personal view is paper qualifications mean you can take notes and read. On the job training means more, I can see if people are capable of doing the job and even having the drive and determination to progress further in a career and a report by an employee for these trainees should be worth there weight in gold.
Kid gets caught cheating. Essay gets downgraded. News at 10.
Now, the actual issue for the school is that kids will get better at hiding their use of chatGPT (GPT stands for General Plagiarism Tool) and other AI tooling. Fundamentally, assesment has to change.
I have friends who lecture in software dev and web technologies. Naturally they don't set many essays - lots of student projects. But they don't just let students submit a project and then "mark" it based on functionality.
The student sends the source code for review, and then has to present the project. At which point they are quizzed on their choice of tooling, modules, architectural choices and why they did certain things the way they did. It's perfectly possible to get a good mark for a buggy project if it was ambitious and you've only got half of it working (but the assessors can see the potential or where it's going).
By contrast, if the student cobbled it together from StackOverflow (or AI tooling) then they won't have good answers to those questions and will get railed in the mini-viva, even if it seems to work pretty well.
Fundamentally, essays will have to move to in-person/class assessment where you can interrogate their knowledge and understanding of the topic. This is great for teachers because it means less take-home marking. Of course you also need to find space in the school day for assessment alongside teaching, and there's the matter of managing consistency - since you can't just go back and ask another teacher to blind-mark an essay to compare grades if you think another teacher is biased or marking inappropriately.
Unfortunately, for future generations of kids, it will all be monitored exams/assessments in metal clad rooms, rather than coursework. Which is unfortunate for those that don't perform well under those circumstances, and time based assessment is not a great method of evaluating someone's knowledge.
An amusing story with, so far, nearly unanimous agreement that this a storm in a teacup destined for litigation.
Do 'prestigious' universities in the USA demand access to the entire internal disciplinary records of school pupils applying for places in their hallowed halls? If so, presumably, ordinary high schools (not the 'elite' variety) are browbeaten into acquiescence.
There may be grounds for demanding sight of non-trivial criminal convictions. It's unlikely that many, perhaps any, applicants to intellectually demanding courses (i.e. excluding sports scholarships and their like) have spent their youth terrorising their neighbourhoods.
What is the National Honor (sic) Society? Apart from encouraging poor literacy, the Society appears to be a kind of freemasonry for socially aspirant senior school pupils (and others?). From its website, the sources of its funding, and ultimate control, are not apparent. This society, along with other such in universities and commerce, has the look of being yet another vain attempt to place a gloss of 'tradition', 'respectability', and 'exclusiveness' within a society of brief history and wilful detachment from deeply rooted cultures elsewhere.
"Do 'prestigious' universities in the USA demand access to the entire internal disciplinary records of school pupils applying for places in their hallowed halls?"
Those records likely can't be shared, but a uni might want to see a personal teacher or staff recommendation. A tepid endorsement might indicate a non-endorsement since there are laws about out and out saying some student/former employee is a huge menace. The more elite "academies" often justify their fees and trade on their placement of students in those prestigious universities, and to get their students a preference in admissions, those students need to be well prepared. The best students will often donate as alumni and grad students even more so.
So the school has not kept up with what is going on around it in the world. AI, well what we currently call AI is now a standard feature of much of the internet. Google search even answers now with an "AI Overview" as the first entry.
Sounds like another case of parents stepping in when their kid has to face the consequences of their own actions. If this student admitted to using AI for a project, they knew it wasn’t fully their work, and getting a slap on the wrist with detention doesn’t seem harsh at all.
What’s the real harm here? They were marked down, not expelled. The idea that this minor consequence will ruin their elite college dreams seems like a stretch. It feels more like parents overreacting and trying to game the system rather than teaching the kid accountability. At the end of the day, AI tools aren’t going anywhere, and kids need to learn how to use them ethically, not hide behind their parents when they get caught.
And if TheRegister tries to ban me for using AI to generate a comment, I'll sue!
A"good" engineer will always review his/her predecessors results. Once during a practical exam, we were asked if a bridge we examined could take a truck and its load safely. On examination and calculation of its support beams we thought it could not support its own weight!
We were then enlightened, that what we thought were cast iron beams were in fact wrought iron beams, but the maker's mark on beams was 'copying' the method of marking on a cast beam, as was the 'fashion' of the time. The examiner then asked a centurion military tank driver to drive across the bridge. The tank [weighing well above the weight limit for cast iron support beams] did so! Example taught - do not always believe marks put by makers on items. Check it.
Ultimately educational establishments are going to face a choice:
1. Continue with unmonitored evaluations where AI use is endemic and devalue their qualifications until they have zero value to employers; or
2. Switch to all monitored evaluation.
Got told explicitely not to do something, did it anyway, got caught and ran to mummy and daddy. Ma and Pa, if they actually understood what was good for the kid, would indicate this as an example of FAFO but they have chosen to doom this kid to a life of frustration as it learns that a massive sense of entitlement is not a career choice.
IMHO I wish they would ban the internet for kids until they are older. Teach them the Dewey Decimal system point them at the library and educate them about why the internet is not a primary source of information. Unfortunately most teachers are young and have grown up believing that wikipaedia is all you need.
I always thought I was crap at mental arithmetic, and it would get worse with age, but it seems not when I watch people grabbing at multi-pack offerings in supermarkets who haven't figured out those are more expensive than buying multiples of smaller packs.
At one time I thought I was more overweight than most.
I'm not sure if I'm doing better than I expected or others are doing far worse.
Mine's the one with the Sinclair Scientific in the pocket. No, there isn't an "equals" button.
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