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.

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.

  • actually@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 month ago

    I think I don’t have enough details to agree with you.

    Lots of variables, some with make the school look good, and/or the kid.

    The student might be an angel who used a small bit of gpt, after saving puppies all night ; or a hellion someone finally had enough of, after repeated issues.

    The parents may be bad, absolute stereotypes. Or perhaps there is a deeper story here about why they are willing to publicly humiliate themselves ; which most lawyers and/or common sense would have told them ahead of time.

    Nobody here knows that much

    • ITGuyLevi@programming.dev
      3·
      1 month ago

      While I’m still on the fence, I’m with the other guy until more information comes out (innocent until proven guilty and all). The information we have is that no rules were broken, perhaps instruction though; it would be similar if a teacher said don’t use Google, or Wikipedia, or any other resource. AI is in education for better or worse.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      Agreed, that’s why updating the rules and asking the student to do the project over would make far more sense to me. It sets the precedent for if any student does such again.

      As I said elsewhere, it could be a great tool, simply asking it for a list of books for the research project would be considered using it, which I don’t think should qualify a student to be placed in detention, or you would need to ban search engines and librarians as well.