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.
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.