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.

  • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    22·
    2 months ago

    Agreed, that’s why updating the rules and asking the student to do the project over would make far more sense to me. It sets the precedent for if any student does such again.

    As I said elsewhere, it could be a great tool, simply asking it for a list of books for the research project would be considered using it, which I don’t think should qualify a student to be placed in detention, or you would need to ban search engines and librarians as well.