So a cheater wants to escape punishment for cheating. That sounds like cheating to me.

Not to worry, he sounds like top manglement material so he'll probably go far in any case.

It's what you'd expect in the USofA these days, what with the Me! Generation's kids coming of age, a hyper-litigious society where any- and everybody else is always to blame for ones failures, and the likes of tRump being an example for oh, so many misguided fools.

Err… it was Harris who plagiarized in her book.

ha! yup, when tRump cant even hold a book up the right way.

(and no i don't have a horse in that race)

Err, it was Melanomia who plagiarized a whole speech...

he sounds like top manglement material so he'll probably go far in any case

My experience of 'Top Manglement' is that the successful* ones are excellent at never being held to account for their mistakes. Never getting caught is essential for bullies, idiots and the 'entitled elite incompetents' to get to the top.

*Successful = getting bonuses, promotions, rewards, and recognised for (other people's) good works and successes.

The school rules do seem clear on the matter - no AI unless explicitly authorised. The issue is whether the child's use could be investigated more and the school take a more generous line, but then they could be sued by the parents of the other pupils in the class who were disadvantaged by not using AI.

Who would be a school-teacher these days?

AIs may very well do a better job at teaching than most

Really?

How would an AI handle two students trying to kill each other?

Recommend they all sit down in a circle and sing "Kumbaya"?

They'd let the two students kill each other. Then they wouldn't have to deal with it. Its the type of things they do in specification gaming tests. Like the AI that kept killing itself at the end of level 1 so tbat it wouldn't fail at level 2.

Schools aren't supposed to be self-cleaning ovens like the real-world can be.

should not != must not

"Should 'not'" is quoted in El Reg's article. Is that accurate?

We don't have the full text of the rules, but "should not and you will be penalized if you do" is equivalent enough to "must not" for this situation.

Well the article was written this way:

Students should "not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed," the policy states.

I presume that the quoted part is from the manual and the two words preceding and three words following it are the author's words.

Digging a bit more at the linked court filing (starting at PDF page 5), it states in an ordered list:

Students shall:

* Not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed. Blah blah blah....

* More points listed.

I'm sure they'll be enthusiastic to accept some kid whose parents launch lawsuits against educational establishments when their little precious gets downmarked for cheating.

Who knew that cheating and violating the rules of the game constitutes a "high level of academic achievement"?

Re: “gain advantage”

Over whom? Surely school papers are scored objectively.

Once you weren’t allowed to use calculators.

Then you were.

Take a calculator to early mathematics classes and see how quickly they take it away. Take a more advanced calculator to classes and they'll require you to downgrade. Take an unapproved calculator to tests and they'll disqualify you. Education and testing are performed under constraints. If you deliberately violate them, that's called cheating. If you think the constraints are bad, then you can try to change them, but if you act like they don't apply because you don't like them, you'll quickly discover how much your opinion affects what the rules say.

"

Re: “gain advantage”

Over whom? Surely school papers are scored objectively.

Once you weren’t allowed to use calculators.

Then you were."

It's not always over somebody else, but if you can move a B+ body of work to an A and become Valedictorian, that looks really good to colleges.

Most of my maths classes in school did not allow the use of calculators, smart-ass me asked if I could use a slide rule. The teacher said I could which made me sit down and learn to use a slide rule. In chemistry and physics class, calculators were mandatory. This was that due to a focus on the science more than the tools (maths). The teachers didn't want wrong answers from shoddy arithmetic.

If calculators are allowed in maths classes now, that's a shame. School is where you need to get a lot of things shoved into memory so you understand them, not just long enough to regurgitate them on a test. I'd see all sorts of crazy stuff interns would do when I was in aerospace. They could run the newest programs but couldn't spot that their answers were far off the mark due to some error that should have been obvious. That was telling me they learned the basics of the tools, but didn't understand the underlying concepts. They also had no idea about error bars, standard materials, fastener call-outs or what the difference was between stick, MiG and TiG welding.

Hmm, so the little bugger cheated and got caught. Hardly unique - according to a friend's daughter, pretty much all her mates use chatgpt to "help" with their homework. That said, it seems like RNH and colleagues have been explicitly told not to use AI tools. Clearly, he hasn't got a leg to stand on, though, if the impact is as extensive as the parents claim, one might hope that the school could be a little more understanding. There again, that isn't really fair on the other kids, who either followed the rules or were smart enough to not get caught.

Unfortunately, AI tools are here to stay, and the future will belong to people who leverage them effectively. You could argue that using them shows initiative and familiarity with the available tools. You could also argue that, in this case, it shows dishonesty, a disregard for the rules and a willingness to use any means to get ahead - attributes that, unfortunately, probably mean he will go far in just about any industry. Not someone I'd be comfortable trusting, though. I'm afraid I have to agree with the school in this case - actions have consequences.

Said little bugger is of an age to be applying to university; he can hardly claim he is a child who doesn't know right from wrong. Or, in this case, doing something explicitly forbidden.

The "impact" of this is being made considerably worse by the parents, who have now by their actions ensured that any web search for the kid's name will forever return results about his cheating and using AI against the rules.

Have they never heard of the Streisand Effect? Did no-one take them quietly to one side and say "look, no matter how you feel about this, the school acted within their own rules, and by screaming & ranting about this you're just going to make it worse and make a mountain out of a molehill"?

Did no-one take them quietly to one side and say "look, no matter how you feel about this, the school acted within their own rules, and by screaming & ranting about this you're just going to make it worse and make a mountain out of a molehill"?

You can't tell Tyler and Tiffany anything...

Good grief, this one wouldn't have survived school playground back in the eighties...

You broke the rules, dumbarse, you got caught. Now you parents have inflicted actual irreparable harm upon you by lawyering up and, well, to quote a famous Canadian: "everybody knows".

Well, after this, who'll ever dare say again that LLMs are useless crapola, hey?! They're a cheater's bees' knees, a fraudster's genie bottle, a crook's snake charming flute! They're super-duper at democratizing high-scores for homework and tests, without the need to threaten smart kids with grave bodily harm to obtain a copy of theirs, for dumb plagiarism, mostly verbatim -- and, most importantly, without the need to study, or understand anything at all really, ever! The earth can remain as comfortably flat as needed ... no ripples in space-time, no confusing geometryzes, and no bloody complex numbers!

Now everyone can appear to be a high-achieving genius (from the outside) thanks to this new tech, and even your own kids! It's magic, illusionism, and frees their time so they can experiment with funny smoke, party tricks, and [1]text-to-booze instead, as they should! And (bonus!) we used to have to pay for this kind of "service" on the web, in the old days, but now it's free as in free beer! In no time flat we'll be able to replace pedagogy with demagogy, at huge cost savings (except for calluses)! What's not to like?!

Minor caveat though, if I were D. and J. Harris, as parents of RNH, I would have hired an AI lawyer right off the bat ... it would have come up with better nonsense than "suffer irreparable harm that is imminent" in this case where the kid did this wrong thing at exactly the wrong time for the "highly competitive admissions process"! My AI lawyer would have instead claimed that the school held the kid tied in barbed wire, in an undergound dungeon, without food or water, mercilessly caning him/her, day in and day out, for weeks, until he/she was but a pale shadow of his/her former self ... (like we used to in the old days!). (gnak, gnak, gnak!)

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/19/kirin_ai_drink_development/

I bet he got extra time for his SATs too...

50 years later

student> *smokes a joint* you know, Leila? I was punished for using your grandparent in school

AI Leila> As an AI I cannot discuss anything related to punishment.

"now suing to rectify"

What is that countries love for suing all about. The only people that benefit are the lawyers.

In the early 90s, about 93, last year of school and 6th form. Managed to get a C in English lang and lit. What helped me? A Just William story that I may or may not have plagerised. Changed the names, changed the story a bit. But I essentially took the whole idea of one of the stories and submitted it as my final short story assignment. Luckily, no one noticed. Maybe I'd changed it enough to be classed as "transformative".