Student “indiscriminately copied and pasted text,” including AI hallucinations.

Student “indiscriminately copied and pasted text,” including AI hallucinations.

A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.

Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son’s grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

The Harris’ motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials “have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law.”

“On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris’ son, referred to by his initials] had cheated,” Levenson wrote. “Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants’ considerable discretion in such matters.”

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 month ago

    Sorry, I wasn’t quite clear.

    The “points” are the grade. An exam might have 40 possible “exam points” and depending on your result you get a certain number of “grade points”. Usually it was 50% to pass, but this percentage may change depending on the exam’s difficulty.

    But still, why would you even have this gigantic set of unused scores in your system? You seem to have a very limited range to determine how well someone did but a huge range to determine how awful someone did. Shouldn’t the difference between a score of 80 and 90 be roughly as much as the difference between 20 and 30?

    And there is no oral exam - a better translation would be participation grade. Basically: Do you listen to the teacher and engage with the content or are you ignoring everything, skipping class and obviously not doing your homework? This is a rather subjective grade the teacher decides upon during the course of the semester though it’s usually fair. They are trained for this after all. If you don’t do your homework in the beginning of thr semester but start doing it later on, this will be appropriately reflected in your grade.

    Additionally, the written grade (average of all exams - there are usually one or two, sometimes with a few easier tests inbetween) factors into your score at least as much as your oral grade. For math, it’s usually a factor of 2:1, for languages it’s usually 1:1.

    But 10 tests sounds insane for me. We only had that for langauge subjects where there were at most 10 vocabulary tests over the course of a semester whose average score was worth as much as at most one exam. The exams are more difficult and there were either one or two per semester per subject.

    Although this is not representative of the entirety of Germany since education is left to the states with limited involvement of the federal government.

    • @MimicJar
      2•1 month ago

      But still, why would you even have this gigantic set of unused scores in your system?

      Someone might be able to answer this better, but that is the system, I’m not sure I can tell you why. I’m guessing it’s meant to roughly mirror how much of the information you (the one being tested) understand/can verify you understood.

      So only knowing 50% of the material is considered a failure. (Same for up to 65% of the material in some cases).

      In terms of points I understand now what you mean and that is also usually true. Class participation might be 30% of your grade, homework might be 30% of your grade and tests might be 40% of your grade. So 30/30 (participation) + 30/30 (homework) + 5/40 (tests), might result in a barely passing grade of 65/100.