Originally published at: Parents sue school that gave low grade to student's AI slop
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Dale and Jennifer Harris, are suing the school, claiming that the student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI.
Let me guess … one of these parents is an attorney. That’s some pathetic lawyerball right there.
The Harris family alleges that their son was unfairly targeted by the Hingham school district because it applied discipline inconsistently.
That’s a more compelling argument, since it’s true at so many schools. Maybe there’s some sense in their motives and they’re trying to address a larger issue…
The lawsuit also questions whether using AI to complete assignments should be prohibited at all.
Oh. Nope.
Quite a message they’re sending to their son.
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Kudos to my computer science professor who did brutally hard homework and then a rather simple, straightforward open book final exam that would weed out the folks who did or did not do their own homework.
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Two further things that this case illustrates are 
- The entitled attitude of “if caught cheating, work the refs to get out of it”, that is being instilled by these sort of parents.
- The toxic concept of “who cares if the kid has learned anything, the purpose of schooling is getting the grades”. This particular attitude, of caring more about the signifier than the substance sums up a lot of what’s wrong with society.
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Probably consistent with messages already sent, if sonny boy really believed using AI was ok.
[Narrator: Student knew full well he was cheating.]
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As an educator I really wish more people understood that getting a good letter grade on an assignment shouldn’t be the goal. The goal should be to understand and demonstrate knowledge of the material in such a way that will hopefully be reflected in a high letter grade.
Begging, pleading and threatening a teacher to give you better grades is like begging, pleading and threatening a doctor to give you better marks on a blood pressure test. Even if they do so it’s not going to change the thing you should actually be concerned about.
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I wonder if either of the Harrises is a cop, and thus used to qualified immunity, where it very much isn’t a crime to be punished unless it’s explicitly prohibited?
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That’s a huge part of the problem with our educational system which is severely outdated, as you know all too well.
Students in general do not necessarily learn to understand and then demonstrate the information that they are given.
The way it’s been set up over this last century, they learn to retain that information just long enough to pass a test or meet a goal, and then they often forget it the moment they don’t need it anymore.
Clearly, this is not a effective way of educating our populace…
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You’re right and proper to say this - and would that it be entirely the case! yet society’s goal remains: accumulate a lot of money for as much a life of luxury as possible, and ‘good’ grades are still the essential factor to getting into a program where a degree makes that much more likely (discounting for billionaires which dropped out of a couple of years of college because their parents funded their start-ups). And then there’s the scarier cases where good grades mean the student doesn’t have to return to their troubled country of origin, (those were the cases on which i was begged for grade inflation which really wrenched me hard -sigh-)
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The student sees the material as getting between them and the grade, the teacher sees the grade as getting between the student and the material.
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Even then, in my experience GPA only gets you so far in academia and in life. If it becomes clear you don’t know shit about shit then nobody really cares about what grades you got.
One of my roles at the college where I teach is on the scholarship committee, so I spend a lot of time scoring scholarship applications based on established rubrics. GPA is one part of that but it’s far from the be-all and end-all. As for my students I advise them that nobody is going to give a shit about their transcript if they can’t show a decent body of work.
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so I spend a lot of time scoring scholarship applications based on established rubrics. GPA is one part of that but it’s far from the be-all and end-all.
That is greatly to your credit - well done indeed! and to that of your institution. alas, i’d grimly assert that it’s often the opposite case. And if anything moreso as one visits the more “ivy covered” institutes where the volume of applicants exceed the funding for admission committees. And yes, i had a colleague recently inform me that their admission committee was going to include an ‘A.I.’ initial appraisal (the irony is palpable) -sigh-
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If you didn’t do the work, you fail; his parents are so typically entitled (Massachusetts, you say…) that we really shouldn’t give them a platform for their stupidity.
I hope this follows this kid around for a decade
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I just saw a CBS news report on this story that says his father is a teacher himself. And the lawsuit seeks for the court to order that the grade be changed to a “B”.
I’m thinking that his dad may not be the best of teachers. I’ve seen a few unrelated stories where some teachers are getting way too comfortable letting AI do their grading for them.
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Someone should get a bad grade in parenting.
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I’m also thinking he may know more than he’d admit about inconsistent discipline.
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I would have thought that “the student didn’t write the work themselves” would have been justification enough for the poor grade… you can’t really frame that in a way that allows one to pretend it’s okay.
I was reading about a university professor who started their classes by having students use ChatGPT to write a paper on a specific topic, then fact check it. None of the students were interested in using generative AI after that. Maybe they need to start doing that earlier in school.
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