Parents take school to court after student punished for using AI

Where and when I grew up, Saturday detentions were pretty common in high schools (don't know if they still are or for other parts of the U.S.). The movie 'The Breakfast Club' is based on Saturday detention. That gave me the impression back then, that they were pretty normal.

Saturday school was common when I was in school a while back. A girl I rode with was late and I had to do it a few times. They even tried to hold my transcript and said I needed to make one up after graduating but they sent it anyway.

If you had to work you could get out of it that weekend. You’d still need to make it up and if you worked every weekend maybe you’d get another punishment.

They can be cooperative. I had to work M-F and weekends and they let me serve detention during active school hours, typically during lunch hours or a study hall block.

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.

Weeknights suffer from same issues tho

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.

Especially when the student handbook detailing the rules for using AI (found elsewhere in the thread) were quite clear and by the sound of it the student clearly violated it, and admitted to doing it. Absolutely bonkers.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

It's all meaningless anyways. What's the difference in me asking ChatGPT something and using the answer, and using some website as reference when the website itself could have used AI without me even knowing.

AI is externalized assistance. Used one way, it can be a guide that helps a individual learn. Used differently, it's no different than asking someone else to do your work for you.

The issue here is academic honesty, not necessarily the definition of "AI". Should a student using Grammarly submit all drafts of their work and cite the changes they didn't make? Should students receiving external help in the form of parents and tutors cite that assistance?

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in an age when ubiquitous search and the internet democratize access to information resources. It's trivial to duplicate documents today, and It's no more of a burden to students to disclose how they are writing.

When I was growing up, teachers knew families who didn't have a home library or had only one car and didn't live near the library were at a disadvantage, so research periods were granted during class. Essays were written and turned in during class periods, and sudden changes to handwriting or style were easy to catch.

Today, the challenges are different, so it seems fair to change the requirements and criteria in response. I've advised friends in education to try assigning AI generated papers with citations as tests and ask students to correct them and expand them from sources.

Asking Siri whether information matches a particular source still isn't possible, and if you're going to have to go through the effort of compiling a bunch of sources for RAG, I think any student equipped to do that would also find it reasonably more efficient to simply do the work directly.