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.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPEnglish
      37·
      2 months ago

      Right? He didn’t earn the knowledge for himself (which is the whole point of school) so he was lucky, IMO, to even get that undeserved 65.

    • frosty99c@midwest.socialEnglish
      23·
      2 months ago

      It’s been a while since teachers were allowed to give out 0s in highschool. When I taught 12 years ago the lowest I was allowed to give was a 65. Even if nothing was turned in.

        • frosty99c@midwest.socialEnglish
          9·
          2 months ago

          “Literally don’t do it” is a 65 and you have the rest of the grading period to make up or redo any assignment up until the last day. So basically, float through 9 weeks doing nothing, then cram in the easiest assignments after school during the last week to get a passing grade.

      • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
        15·
        2 months ago

        I imagine this must depend on the location of the school in question. Im in my mid 20s, so my high school experience was more recent than 12 years ago, but I remember getting quite a few zeros (was an absolutely horrible procrastinator who would tend to respond to the stress of having a due date coming up by doing anything else to not think about the source of said stress, which led to a lot of simply not turned in schoolwork)

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        Oh jeez. Maybe it’s that I was in private school but I was a senior in high school and I only stopped getting zeros for un turned in work because my mom got cancer.