Comment by chabes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chabes | Hacker News Reader

Tl;dr: 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.

The parents say that the student will suffer irreparable harm from the school’s punishment.

From the article:

> RNH was temporarily held back from joining the National Honor Society and parents want their offspring's academic records cleared of any mention of the incident. In addition, they want the student to receive a B grade for the project and the removal of any indication that cheating was involved.

The school’s defense is that students weren’t allowed to use AI for their research, and that the student failed to cite the AI as a source.

From the article:

> The school argues that RNH, along with his classmates, was given a copy of the student handbook in the Fall of last year, which specifically called out the use of AI by students.

> "RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so," the school argues.

> "Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted. Importantly, RNH’s peers were not allowed to cut corners by using AI to craft their projects; thus, RNH acted 'unfairly in order to gain an advantage.'"

> 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.

I'd reserve the judgement on the last one. It may become hard to get attention of the school, and the damage to the student at this stage is very real. However as stated in the article, the part about school policies, even the use of AI to research for the paper was forbidden. Well, maybe this is unreasonable enough... but I wouldn't be swift with decisions here.

I think there is at least also the question of how often student handbooks need to be provided/reviewed. "The fall of last year" is quite a bit ago, I would have expected that the rules are reviewed every year. Especially with new technological advances, I can understand some confusion / misremembering of the rules, and I think surprising rules should probably be re-addressed at least yearly.

This incident took place in December of last year, so 2-3 months after the student handbook would have been distributed and the in classroom review of the policy would have taken place. 2-3 months doesn't seem too long to expect a student to remember a policy.

The rule of turning in your original work is pretty central, though, and not something an honors scholar should need to be constantly reminde of. What the parents are doing reminds me of all of the “on the internet” parents in the 90s where people were basically hoping to snow a judge with a claim that using new technology was inherently transformative and not covered by precedent.

I'd have to agree. And honestly, even if the kid didn't admit to using AI, if they were using AI as a source and not citing it, then it was a failing paper regardless, as certainly one of the requirements was to cite sources.

If I was handling this, I'd treat it the same as if somebody just copy pasted some text off Google search and didn't cite. I'm not sure I'd give the student a 0. But it wouldn't be a good grade and I'd have to read the paper to see the extent to which Id agree it rises to the level of cheating.

> I'm not sure I'd give the student a 0.

Completely agree with you on all of it, but, to let you know, sometimes there are school-wide policies on plagiarism that teachers have to follow. My highschool made teachers give an automatic 0 for any plagiarism.

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