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.
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.