Student was punished for using AI—then his parents sued teacher and administrators
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I opened this article expecting a situation where a student had either been incorrectly accused of using AI, or had used it for some of the brainstorming or research aspects of a project and was then (questionably) accused of plagiarism under a broad and poorly-worded policy.
Nope. Policy (if reported correctly by the school - and I suspect they did report it correctly since the parents don't seem to be arguing this part) was reasonable and clearly stated. Student violated it. Parents are entitled idiots, overly invested in their kid's academic success. (Or really, its appearance, since we're going for grades over learning here.)
It's such a caricature that IMO it's not even a real commentary on AI at all. The AI adds no real nuance or complexity to this situation; there's no gray area about how or whether it was used.
Nope. Policy (if reported correctly by the school - and I suspect they did report it correctly since the parents don't seem to be arguing this part) was reasonable and clearly stated. Student violated it. Parents are entitled idiots, overly invested in their kid's academic success. (Or really, its appearance, since we're going for grades over learning here.)
It's such a caricature that IMO it's not even a real commentary on AI at all. The AI adds no real nuance or complexity to this situation; there's no gray area about how or whether it was used.
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I feel the following is also a major concern:
Apparently this "National Honors Society" is some accolade to covet but they accept students who cheat? Where is the honour in that?Pat. Ledger said:
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I'm getting a real "if he isn't able to earn a lot of money, how will he support us in our old age" vibe off these parents.
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The whole "fail because you used a calculator" is likely because you are practicing the fundamentals of how calculators perform their function. When you are allowed to use a calculator, it is presumed that you know how to do basic math operations already. Or some of the more advanced stuff. In those cases, you should already know what operations are taking place. If you are using a calculator for doing math operations that you are learning about and will be tested on, that is cheating and should be dealt with accordingly.
In this case, the student was being trained up on writing a history paper. The student would be demonstrating the capability to collect relevant information, evaluate it's relevance, and then condense it into some report or paper. Using AI in this case to research, compile, draft, and edit sort of bypasses everything that the student is supposed to be demonstrating.
This isn't so much an "anti-AI" article, rather it is an article about some parents who are upset that their child (almost a legal adult!) was too lazy to properly do his work and he got punished for it and filed a lawsuit over it. If it wasn't some AI tool it could've been something else. But obviously the parents don't know how AI works in the first place if they think it generates something novel. Unless it is a hallucination of course...
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I am university faculty, and about 10% of my students use LLMs to fabricate their ideas and written language every semester. In some unfortunate cases, it's not falsifiable (i.e. it's very hard to prove beyond doubt), so I ask them to rewrite the work just because it's bland, meaningless, and lacks a voice. In the more "fortunate" cases, the student uses it on a research paper, for which LLM's are very bad at sourcing, so the quotations and works cited are demonstrably fabricated.
(Just to describe how egregious it can be, a student designing a tabletop deck-building game this semester, who was supposed to do research on the theme of the game, submitted an 'impeccable', 'academically worded' paper about building decks made of literal wood, complete with 'scholarly' sources from the construction industry.)
It's such a huge problem that a lot of them must get away with it. And, to be honest, I'm not surprised. The bureaucracy involved in imposing sanctions on these students involves scheduling personal meetings, having uncomfortable conversations, and imposing unavoidable fines (which, let my opinion be clear, is stupid – money should have nothing to do with academic integrity) – with each individual. When 10% of your students are doing it, it's just insane unpaid overhead for those of us working on contract per class, and I know a lot of my colleagues have reached the "it's their loss, but being a policeman is not what I signed up for" stage.
It's hard for me not to feel like there are going to be downstream social consequences.
(Just to describe how egregious it can be, a student designing a tabletop deck-building game this semester, who was supposed to do research on the theme of the game, submitted an 'impeccable', 'academically worded' paper about building decks made of literal wood, complete with 'scholarly' sources from the construction industry.)
It's such a huge problem that a lot of them must get away with it. And, to be honest, I'm not surprised. The bureaucracy involved in imposing sanctions on these students involves scheduling personal meetings, having uncomfortable conversations, and imposing unavoidable fines (which, let my opinion be clear, is stupid – money should have nothing to do with academic integrity) – with each individual. When 10% of your students are doing it, it's just insane unpaid overhead for those of us working on contract per class, and I know a lot of my colleagues have reached the "it's their loss, but being a policeman is not what I signed up for" stage.
It's hard for me not to feel like there are going to be downstream social consequences.
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I suspect it's consistent with the example they've been giving him since he was born:
You're special
Rules don't apply to you
When in trouble mommy and daddy will fix it for you
When they can't we'll bully, threaten and even sue to make sure little Bobby doesn't have to suffer any consequences for his actions.
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This is an outrageous lawsuit, but this is America, if you have the money you can sue anybody for anything. Wake me up if any court anywhere agrees with the parents. They're going to get slapped down with prejudice if there is any justice left in the world.
The kid didn't even get punished all that hard. He got a 0 for the parts where he didn't do the work and that's about it. That's incredibly lenient, he didn't even get detention!
The kid didn't even get punished all that hard. He got a 0 for the parts where he didn't do the work and that's about it. That's incredibly lenient, he didn't even get detention!
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The parents have frivolous lawsuit money and live on the rich side of town. I'm not sure they're hard up for cash.
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Someone call Child Protective Services. These parents don't know how to raise a child responsably.
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Literally just had to do this. AI, help me figure out how to make this count of errors in the last 12 hours stop saying 0 and 1 are the same (because my scripting is WAY stronger in Powershell than Bash, and I think the use of | wc -l was incorrect). So the AI goes, "sure here's how to do it. by the way, timestamps may be in different formats" and doesn't mention that it totally just swapped out the "figure out the last 12 hours timestamp" part of the script and swapped in a static one 2 years old.
It's a tool. It got me to the end quicker. It did NOT do it correctly and I had to take the output and fix the parts it messed up.
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Ive pretty much resigned myself to the fact Ill die when some doctor inserts a needle into my eye for a blood test because some google search AI summary suggested it, citing this very post.
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One of my favorite classes was a grad class on CAD. It was about how parametric modeling worked. Much of the class was hand calculating linear transformations and other complex matrix math involved in parametric modeling. Gave me a much better understanding of how to work with Parametric CAD software.
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10% useful, but in a way that can save hours of work. Just like me. cries
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They don't have to be rich to behave like this, but usually the process of hiring a lawyer and bringing it to court involves real money.
Otherwise, some parents just bitch that "the system is out to get their kid" to anyone who will listen, but it never gets past the school walls, board meeting, or podunk newspaper.
(worked in educational IT for over a decade)
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It kind of sounds like that's what happened though. He wasn't accused of plagiarism for the final draft.
But was for the research, notes, and outlining portions of the project. Which sounds like the project had multiple stages where each was graded separately. This makes me wonder if his teacher had an opportunity to raise the issue when initially grading the outline.
Overall, I feel like more details are needed.
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I honestly wonder how often the parents coached RNH on other homework.
I know there were were some students in my school system that did markedly worse on tests and other in-class assignments compared to homework and out-of-class projects, and I seriously doubt performance anxiety explains even most of them.
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Yeah, I had a similar experience during my undergrad with 3D modeling (for a Comp Sci course). We had to do our own matrix translations and operations before having some graphics libraries do the work for us. While I didn't do much with it afterwards, it did help me appreciate the utterly insane number of operations taking place frame by frame to render any sort of dynamic scene.
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My wife is a former community college prof. A big reason why "former" is because she was burnt out on the administration letting cheating slide. Students would protest getting zeros when multiple ones turned in the same work verbatim. And the admin would allow them to get away with it.
And this was before AI. I can only imagine it has gotten much worse.
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Way before AI, but I got accused of plagiarism on a college paper once because it was "too good". I told the professor I didn't know whether to take it as a compliment that they thought my paper was good, or an insult because they thought my previous papers weren't.
Anyway, I hadn't actually plagiarised, so I just told them so and that it was up to them to believe me or not. They obviously decided to believe me, because I got an A and they never mentioned it again.
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Their trying to claim there is no rule against it, but the rule doesnt have to state AI is forbidden. The rule is "use of unauthorized technology". If it wasnt authorized then its unauthorized.
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The interview you linked did give a window into their (the parents) thinking. The parents seem glowing over their little angel and he got caught using a tool to do his school work. I'm not against students using AI to do their work. Same thing with employees using AI to complete their work. But it's on the person using the tool to present it in a way that is not obviously AI-generated.
I work with quite a few people who send out e-mails and summaries of thing that are clearly copy and pasted from AI. It gets the point across sure. But you can tell by your normal interactions and comms with how they naturally communicate vs how their "out-of-character" summarized statements appear.
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It's pretty dumb to do this for an AP class. The point is to prepare for the test, so you shouldn't do assignments using tools you won't have access to when you're taking the test.
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Sure, but the thing is, you've put in the work to learn the your field well enough that you can troubleshoot the output and make it useful. High school kid, whatever his SAT scores, doesn't know shit about shit. You've got to learn to walk before you use AI to run.
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Somewhat OT but I had a math class where we used programmable calculators. I asked the teacher if it was allowed to copy important equations into memory for use on the tests. All he would say is "I am not going to inspect everyone's calculator". But is it ok? "I am not going to inspect everyone's calculator". He could have just said no, but wouldnt. The way people are sometimes it just makes my brain complain.
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What he was telling you was "actually telling you this is ok is going to make my boss crawl up my ass, so just know I don't care and won't be checking."
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