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Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

theregister.com

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Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#11

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

Vuska wrote: post #10

The motion to dismiss is revealing. https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/10/15/dismiss.pdf The AI policy starts at the bottom of page 5. Students have to mention any use of AI, even generating ideas. They must include an appendix with "the entire exchange, highlighting the most relevant sections" and provide an explanation for how and why everything was used. It seems overly strict to me, hastily written when ChatGPT became p…

Kids need to learn how to think and have their own ideas, then as adults if they want to give in to the mediocrity of offloading their thinking to machines they'll have that chance.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#12

Post by tssva »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #9
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a student was caught cheating on their project, admitted to such, was punished, and now the parents are suing the school in an attempt to salvage their child’s academic reputation To be fair, the question is whether the student handbook's definition of cheating covered using AI. Of course, the kid is almost certainly already rotten, given his parents couldn't find a better way to resolve this.

I think there is at least also the question of how often student handbooks need to be provided/reviewed. "The fall of last year" is quite a bit ago, I would have expected that the rules are reviewed every year. Especially with new technological advances, I can understand some confusion / misremembering of the rules, and I think surprising rules should probably be re-addressed at least yearly.

This incident took place in December of last year, so 2-3 months after the student handbook would have been distributed and the in classroom review of the policy would have taken place. 2-3 months doesn't seem too long to expect a student to remember a policy.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#13

Post by haburka »

Absolutely insane that you can sue a school in the US for this kind of thing. I mean, these parents have got to be out of their mind to spend so much effort and money to defend their child from rule breaking. It must be so embarrassing as the child to have parents like this.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#14

Post by acdha »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #9
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a student was caught cheating on their project, admitted to such, was punished, and now the parents are suing the school in an attempt to salvage their child’s academic reputation To be fair, the question is whether the student handbook's definition of cheating covered using AI. Of course, the kid is almost certainly already rotten, given his parents couldn't find a better way to resolve this.

I think there is at least also the question of how often student handbooks need to be provided/reviewed. "The fall of last year" is quite a bit ago, I would have expected that the rules are reviewed every year. Especially with new technological advances, I can understand some confusion / misremembering of the rules, and I think surprising rules should probably be re-addressed at least yearly.

The rule of turning in your original work is pretty central, though, and not something an honors scholar should need to be constantly reminde of. What the parents are doing reminds me of all of the “on the internet” parents in the 90s where people were basically hoping to snow a judge with a claim that using new technology was inherently transformative and not covered by precedent.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#15

Post by aaron695 »

ksaj wrote: post #2

What kind of school has weekend detentions? What if a student has a job. Even without that, weekends are often family time, and certainly unwind time. I would never allow a school to punish my kid on a non-school day, no matter what they may or may not have done.

[dead]

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#16

Post by grugagag »

haburka wrote: post #13

Absolutely insane that you can sue a school in the US for this kind of thing. I mean, these parents have got to be out of their mind to spend so much effort and money to defend their child from rule breaking. It must be so embarrassing as the child to have parents like this.

On the one hand I agree with you and think school shouldn’t allow for sloppy thinking and relying on effortless work such as prompting, copying and pasting. And yet we have no idea where this will take is nor have we any idea if it will be 100% bad, we assume so and I tend catch myself do this too. But once the storm settles this could open us up to a new chapter in education for example. Mainstream AI may evolve beyond ChatGPT at some point and if that happens humans will have a very different place in history.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#17

Post by zifpanachr23 »

ksaj wrote: post #2

What kind of school has weekend detentions? What if a student has a job. Even without that, weekends are often family time, and certainly unwind time. I would never allow a school to punish my kid on a non-school day, no matter what they may or may not have done.

Most schools I imagine. Often, it's used for extreme truancy issues, i.e. in the State of Texas, you have to be present a certain number of days I believe per school year.

So Saturday detention tended to be a thing you'd get sent to if you had a truly outrageous number of absences.

I believe there was a way for situations like serious illness where this rule doesn't apply. But let's be honest, most situations of excessive absences that I saw back in High School were NOT that.

In that sense, your kid isn't really being "punished" by receiving Saturday detention. It's just, the school doesn't have to advance them to the next grade level either if they missed like half the school days for the year and are under the minimum attendance. Like it or not, education in the United States is compulsory and part of that is that there is usually some kind of attendence policy. If you don't like it, then you can homeschool.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#18

Post by zifpanachr23 »

Vuska wrote: post #10

The motion to dismiss is revealing. https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/10/15/dismiss.pdf The AI policy starts at the bottom of page 5. Students have to mention any use of AI, even generating ideas. They must include an appendix with "the entire exchange, highlighting the most relevant sections" and provide an explanation for how and why everything was used. It seems overly strict to me, hastily written when ChatGPT became p…

I do think that could be academic dishonesty depending on what came out of ChatGPT and how it was used. But it depends.

Let's also be perfectly clear that "Can you help me with homework about X" is probably not the question actually being asked. We know that these questions are just being pasted in verbatim. That is absolutely academic dishonesty.

This case is a little different. But let's not pretend that teachers in many subjects areny being taken advantage of and screwed over by these tools and students willing to use them. I'm sure they are all frustrated and willing to jump the gun against the slightest sign of this sort of thing. Tragedy of the commons situation, it's going to ruin academic culture in the US imo if there aren't extremely strict rules laid down and quickly.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#19

Post by krapp »

Vuska wrote: post #10

The motion to dismiss is revealing. https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/10/15/dismiss.pdf The AI policy starts at the bottom of page 5. Students have to mention any use of AI, even generating ideas. They must include an appendix with "the entire exchange, highlighting the most relevant sections" and provide an explanation for how and why everything was used. It seems overly strict to me, hastily written when ChatGPT became p…

>Pretty soon most students are going to be say "Hey Siri, help me with my homework it's about X" and get an AI answer - are they all academically dishonest?

I mean, it doesn't matter in the long run since academia will be as entirely AI driven as education soon enough, and the entire concept of "academic integrity" will be nothing but a quaint atavism from the days when the human in the loop was actually relevant, but yes.

Re: Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

#20

Post by zifpanachr23 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #5
chabes wrote: post #3

Tl;dr: a student was caught cheating on their project, admitted to such, was punished, and now the parents are suing the school in an attempt to salvage their child’s academic reputation. The parents say that the student will suffer irreparable harm from the school’s punishment. From the article: > RNH was temporarily held back from joining the National Honor Society and parents want their offspring's academic record…

> a student was caught cheating on their project, admitted to such, was punished, and now the parents are suing the school in an attempt to salvage their child’s academic reputation To be fair, the question is whether the student handbook's definition of cheating covered using AI. Of course, the kid is almost certainly already rotten, given his parents couldn't find a better way to resolve this.

I'd have to agree. And honestly, even if the kid didn't admit to using AI, if they were using AI as a source and not citing it, then it was a failing paper regardless, as certainly one of the requirements was to cite sources.

If I was handling this, I'd treat it the same as if somebody just copy pasted some text off Google search and didn't cite. I'm not sure I'd give the student a 0. But it wouldn't be a good grade and I'd have to read the paper to see the extent to which Id agree it rises to the level of cheating.

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