School Did Nothing Wrong When It Punished Student For Using AI, Court Rules
- Reference: 0175518983
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/21/2330242/school-did-nothing-wrong-when-it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules
- Source link:
> 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 [1]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.
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> The Harris' motion for an injunction was rejected in [2]an order (PDF) issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson [3]found that school officials "have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law ."
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> "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." "On the evidence currently before the Court, I detect no wrongdoing by Defendants," Levenson also wrote.
"The manner in which RNH used Grammarly -- wholesale copying and pasting of language directly into the draft script that he submitted -- powerfully supports Defendants' conclusion that RNH knew that he was using AI in an impermissible fashion," Levenson wrote. While "the emergence of generative AI may present some nuanced challenges for educators, the issue here is not particularly nuanced, as there is no discernible pedagogical purpose in prompting Grammarly (or any other AI tool) to generate a script, regurgitating the output without citation, and claiming it as one's own work," the order said.
Levenson concluded with a quote from a [4]1988 Supreme Court ruling that said the education of youth "is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges." According to Levenson, "This case well illustrates the good sense in that division of labor. The public interest here weighs in favor of Defendants."
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/16/2045235/parents-take-school-to-court-after-student-punished-for-using-ai
[2] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.275605/gov.uscourts.mad.275605.30.0_3.pdf
[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/11/school-did-nothing-wrong-when-it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules/
[4] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/484/260/#tab-opinion-1957304
Kudos to school for standing up! (Score:4, Insightful)
All the administrators I've worked with cave in at the slightest threat of legal action. That this school had the integrity to fight the lawsuit indicates its students should be proud to study there.
Teacher use of AI (Score:2)
And....is there a prohibition of teachers using AI to reduce their workload?
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Artificial intelligence is already changing how teachers teach
Educators have ChatGPT and other software spitting out lesson plans and posing as characters from novels
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But what is more disturbing is Teachers pay Teachers ttps://www.teacherspayteachers.com where teachers can buy just about anything they need without doing the work of creating lesson plans, creating tests, etc.
There are even teachers t
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/13/ai-education-teachers-lesson-plans/
LLMs are here to stay, use them (Score:2)
The problem is not that the student used an LLM to do his homework. The problem is that he was given homework that could be done by an LLM. Assignments should be updated to be such that an LLM cannot do it flat out.
Re: (Score:3)
Please come up with A SINGLE EXAMPLE of a High School level HOMEWORK problem that could not be done by an LLM.
I will proceed to show you how to use an LLM to help solve it.
Its bad enough (Score:2)
When a student cheats you arnt learning a skill go progress to the next step and whether you get caught or not, it only ends up hurting them. When the parents are reinforcing the behavior, its never likely they will ever correct that and do anything but look for a shortcut which will ultimately hurt them and everyone working around them. Its too bad the school doesnt have the gonads to step up and stop this before it becomes common place, but that is "education" today.
How stupid? (Score:3, Insightful)
> "The manner in which RNH used Grammarly -- wholesale copying and pasting of language directly into the draft script that he submitted -- powerfully supports Defendants' conclusion that RNH knew that he was using AI in an impermissible fashion
It's pretty incredible that a High School student is so stupid as to not at least re-word what the LLM provided. Never mind the cheating aspect of what he did, although that's bad enough. But that degree of witlessness, at that age, does not bode well for him being able to function in any job requiring intellectual sophistication, analytical ability, or even just basic common sense.
Additionally, those lawsuit-filing parents need to take a good long look in the mirror, get a fucking clue, and ask themselves if their precious bundle of joy came out of the womb with such intellectual deficits or if their parenting was simply that bad.
This kid may be salvageable, but Mom and Dad need to stop enabling their son and get him some help that doesn't come from a lawyer or from an LLM being used as a substitute for thinking and learning.