School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm going out on a limb here, but if this is the viewpoint of the people who raised him, then I'm not surprised he cheated.
If this was my son and the facts were the same, he'd be grounded in addition to whatever consequence the school deems fit.
As judge said, "the emergence of generative AI may present some nuanced challenges for educators, the issue here is not particularly nuanced"
On the other hand, if you read some text first (be it ChatGPT's output, or a textbook) and then rephrase it yourself, then you are the author.
How much you have to rephrase? Is changing every other word with synonym enough? That's actually a gray area, and it depends on the teacher. Most teachers would expect you to at least change sentence structure. But in this case it's completely irrelevant, as we know the students did copy/paste.
I really don't see why you are trying to present ChatGPT like something special re plagiarism. Copying other's work is copying. Paying $10 to someone to do your homework and then copying their answer as-is is cheating. So is using ChatGPT yo do it for free.
If there is a spelling bee, but student is secretly using spellcheck on the phone, they are cheating.
If there is a math speed competition, but student is using a calculator on the phone, they are cheating.
If it's a calculus exam, but student is using Wolfram Alpha (or TI-89) to calculate integrals and derivatives, it is cheating.
If it's a written exam but student is using ChatGPT to write the text, it is cheating as well. Not that different from previous cases.
These are games no one in the real world is interested in playing.
If your position is correct, then I suppose asking another person to write an essay for you is in fact your writing as well. Which is absurd.
This pedantry is useless. Ask any person if an essay produced by AI was written by the person writing the prompt and I think a majority will say “no”. If AIs writing essays for you isn’t plagiarism, then nothing is.
Situation A - a person uses a tool. They are the author.
Situation B - a person contracts another person. They are not the author. The other person might be using a tool, but it doesn't matter.
This is not a theoretical debate. This is how the current legal framework works, and if you expect someone to behave differently, you have to be explicit. Change the law if you want the default to be different. This is how it works now.
> This pedantry is useless. Ask any person if an essay produced by AI was written by the person writing the prompt and I think a majority will say “no”.
I'm an expert in the field. I don't need to ask mainstream people about their sci-fi influenced opinions, they don't matter to me nor to the law. This is how it works, it's not magic, it's not scifi, it's not a person, it can't be an author and thus it can't be plagiarized by the user, nor the user can violate the tool's copyright by using the output.
It's a tool that authors can use to create their works, and even if all they did is push a single button, they are the author. Compare this to me applying a filter on a blank canvas to produce an abstract art wallpaper in Photoshop - am I the author or is Photoshop? Let me tell you, don't try to steal my work. I did it, not Photoshop, that was just a tool that made it easier for me.
Same with ChatGPT - this morning I used it to write an architectural proposal. It's my proposal, there is no way I somehow "plagiarized" something. Doesn't matter that I pushed like 50 buttons in total; it's my work, I am the author.
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And if schools don't actively teach children to use this technology, they should be reformed. If this school was in my city, I'd vote for the party that will cancel it - for the extremely serious offense of letting the children think it's wrong to use tools. At least they should explain that the goal is elsewhere and why a particular tool shouldn't be used for that task. It's not like children will just know, you know.
This is just like when teachers at my own school told us that Wikipedia is a bad source and we can't use it because it can't be trusted. That's total bullshit, just be honest - this assignment is supposed to test your writing skills, not tool usage skills.
The classroom teacher was explicit in their expectations. The student did not follow the instructions. Did you RTFA?
> It's a tool that authors can use to create their works
This isn't about authorship or ownership. It doesn't matter whether the words are "yours" or not - that you keep making that a point of contention is a semantic sideshow. This isn't a commercial or artistic enterprise. If the student wants to publish their copy-pasted, error-ridden slop (or masterful slop!), then by all means, they can go for it.
Rather, this is a classroom, the goal is to learn, think, and demonstrate understanding. Copy-pasting responses from AI does not do this (even setting aside the explicit instructions not to to do so). Similarly, plagiarism isn't bad in high school because it hurts other authors, it's bad because it's a lazy end-run around the process of learning and thinking that undermines those goals and creates bad habits to avoid critical thinking.
If you simplify and trivialize everything to an extreme degree, then yes, you might have a point…
> Wikipedia is a bad source and we can't use it because it can't be trusted
No, but you still shouldn’t use it for anything besides research (i.e. you should be citing the sources the Wikipedia article is based on directly).
> just be honest - this assignment is supposed to test your writing skills,
Isn’t that more than perfectly obvious already?
A lot of times that's fine - after all, there are programmers who spend their careers never writing an original algorithm, and they could definitely use the help. And in a lot of cases an original architecture is actually a bad idea - stick to the boring technology, create your architecture proposal based on re-blending previous projects with a tiny bit of changes. Nothing wrong with that.
But school tries to be better than that (it does not always succeed, but it at least tries). That's why the students are taught how to multiply numbers by hand, and only then they are allowed calculators. And they must be taught how find their primary sources, before being allowed to use Wikipedia. And they must be taught how to write their thoughts in their words, before being allowed to ChatGPT.
Sure, some of them will go on and never multiply numbers by hand, nor ever read a primary source nor ever create a highly original proposal. That's fine and even expected. Still, the school aims high even if not everyone can get there.
If ChatGPT copies the wikipedia article, you are now in trouble. Your tool caused you to plagiarize and not even notice but that won't save you. Same if you include complete nonsense generated by your tool. Still your fault (although some lawyers have been getting away with it.)
If you copy the wikipedia article yourself, at least you know you cheated.
But equating the tool to the plagiarizing is absurd. What is possible is that perhaps the problem is now outperformed / overpowered by the tool. It may now be trivial to answer the problem. A few clicks?
But again it's long tradition for schools to outlaw some tools in the effort to teach something specific that the tool would replace: calculator out of bounds, or only basic calculator and no computer, no books, sliderule only, etc.
Schools need to adapt. Explain why a tool is forbidden - it will improve efficiency of learning if the kids know what is the purpose. Use different more fun method to teach mind skills, and teach overcoming problems using various always evolving and changing hi-tech tools - instead of the rigid lesson/homework style of today. Teach them that change is constant and that they need to adapt. This is not something theoretical - there are state sponsored schools operating in this way where I live. It's great.
This is unproductive and unenlightening pedantry.
That said, the kids are clearly defenseless in this situation, for blatant plagiarism as well as just being just being factually incorrect in their report.
Theoretically true, but irrelevant because this particular case isn't that.
It ain't that hard to connect the dots unless you're going out of your way to not connect the dots.
Here is a relevant quote from the TFA:
> Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations).
(And re better rating: sadly making classes less useful usually improves the rating. I sure if there was a class where they were just watching cartoons, with super-simple quizzes at the end that everyone could answer, it'd have highest ratings from most students, as well as high ratings from many parents, and best scores on finals. Now, it might not work that hot in real world, but by that time the school would be long over...)
Why do you expect children to know math only after months of tries, but understand the perils of AI after hearing one sentence regulation? That's not going to help the kids. You need to spend time practicing using the tool with them, showing them the pitfalls in practice, and only after enough time you can start rating them.
The school handed them a gun and they're Pikachu surprised a kid got shot, and now they're blaming it on the kid that had it in hands - but the school is to blame. And it's certainly not newsworthy, or where is the math exam results article?
What you are describing might make sense for "ChatGPT class", but that wasn't it, that was AP History.
(And that's how schools work in general: in real life, no one integrates matrixes by hand; and yet calculus classes do not teach CAS systems or their perils)
Remember the "disciplinary action" here is giving the student a bad grade, with the opportunity to redo the assignment.
Are you seriously asserting they should've gotten a good grade for a paper that cites sources that don't exist? In an advanced placement class no less?
If anything they're getting of lighter than students who did a bad job on their own without using AI. I know I was never given a chance to redo a paper I phoned in.
“Clarity isn’t found in answers; it’s carved from the questions we dare to ask.” - ChatGPT, https://chatgpt.com/share/67439692-b098-8011-b1df-84d3761bba...
But no paper (even high school level) which does that should ever be accepted..
If you're clear what your sources are, why does it matter who (or what) you quote?
Boris Johnson and GWB are known (for different reasons) spouting jibberish sentences, yet cite them and if the quote was appropriate then no foul; all fiction is made up and that too can be quoted when appropriate.
When I was at school in the UK 24 years back, media studies was denigrated as "mickey mouse studies", but in restrospect the ability to analyse and desconstruct media narratives would have been useful for the country.
Now AI is a new media.
Sometimes it will be the right thing to quote; sometimes it will be as much of an error as citing Wuthering Heights in an essay about how GWB handled the War On Terror.
Courts aren’t stupid for the most part. Most of them are happy to interpret things in terms of what a ‘reasonable person’ would think, for better or worse. Right now, most reasonable people would say that using an LLM to do your work without disclosing it is in violation of the spirit of the student handbook.
I could fine tune an AI, and name it after myself, and put my own name at the top of the paper as an attribution, but no reasonable person would say that was following the spirit of the law if I turned that in as a class assignment.
Only someone trying to cheat would use the excuse that it wasn’t explicitly stated that AI was cheating.
This reminds me of the court case where they asked the court to define child pornography and they said “I can can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”
Imagine saying with a straight face that some pictures you have of a minor are fine because this particular pose, facial expression, and clothing wasn’t specifically designed child porn. It would instantly make you sound like a pedo, like he sounds like a cheater
If you’re referring to the famous statement from Justice Potter Stewart’s concurrence in Jacobellis v. Ohio, that comment was in reference to defining “hardcore pornography,” not child pornography.
Stewart's ruling was ridiculous: how is anyone supposed to know whether something is "pornographic" or not if it can just be determined by some judge arbitrarily and capriciously, and there's no objective standard whatsoever? They could just rule any picture of an unclothed person to be illegal, even if it's something medical in nature. Heck, they could even rule a medical diagram to be porn. Or anything they want, really.
Is this a controversy in the US?
I am fine with people worrying about Zuckerberg or Sandar potentially watching their naked kids, but I guess that the angle is that the parents would be 'perverts' and not the surveillance state being a problem?
It was subject to litigation at the time it was released and was upheld as not being obscene. But it continued to cause moral panics and was eventually taken out of print by the publisher.
But it was never banned and can still be found as a collector's item. And in the mid 70's it was completely normal to walk into a book store and see it on display.
Anyway, "pushing the rules" is so vague, and it could be done intelligently, ethically, or otherwise.
In this particular case the student copy-pasted AI output in an assignment and tried to pass it off as his own work. I mean, come on... the fact his went to court is just absurd
People who "push the rules" (I call this cheating, if I was playing a tabletop game with someone who did this, I would say they were cheating too) have an unfair advantage over the people who do follow the rules.
People who are good at pushing the rules and have some kind of knack for knowing which rules to push and how far, end up succeeding over the rule-followers, while the people who lack this talent and push the wrong rules, or push too far, end up failing somehow (and maybe in prison).
At my child's elementary school and now middle school the teachers openly ecourage using AI chat for schoolwork, to help the kids understand the usefulness and the uselessness of it.
I think that's great. AI isn't going away, so pretending students won't be using it at all times, both now and in their lives, is pretty naive and hopeless. Better to embrace it and teach them what it can and can't do.
From the article:
> the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations).
They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". Which would also be a good lesson in why AI is useful but you can't trust it at all without validation.
I agree with that but school should focus on fundamentals. The temptation and the ability of AI to do the school work for students so they don't need to put into any effort is a real problem; learning should require some effort and AI could solve that part for students. On the other hand AI could be used for some type of education, but then people tend to throw the baby with the bathwater and declare AI as the principal tool for learning, further diminishing the role of professors and mentors.
As far as I am aware, they weren’t punished for using AI specifically, they were punished for straight up copypasting AI output thus violating cheating policies (in addition to hallucinating non-existent citations). Whether it was copypasted from AI or from another real person is irrelevant, the AI part just made it easier to prove in this particular case.
The school even affirmed in their statement that AI was allowed to be used for brainstorming topics or identifying topics (quote directly from the article):
“Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application”
There is no law against plagiarizing on assignments by copying off a real human either, what’s your point?
If AI generated an assignment paper for me, and I simply copypasted it and turned it in as my own, I don’t see it being materially different from the same being done with a paper written by another human (rather than AI).
> the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world
The purpose of each individual class is to teach students the skills that the class is supposed to teach. If the class in the OP was on proper usage of AI, that would be a different story, but it wasn’t.
Similarly, you wouldn’t write your own memory allocator in the real world, you would use an existing library for that. That doesn’t mean you will get away with just simply importing an existing memory allocator library in your assignment code and calling it a day.
If that's what they were doing, then I agree that the real problem wasn't the use of AI as such. The real problem was that this is clearly plagiarism. Punishing it the same as any other plagiarism sounds appropriate.
I'm not grasping at the furthest of straws, I see a distinction between 'verbatim copying someone else's work' and 'verbatim copying the results of a tool that produces text'.
A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?
the easier definition is “did YOU write this?” if answer is no - you plagiarised it and should be punished to the full extent.
I'm not saying what the guy did wasn't wrong or dumb, I'm saying: Plagiarism has a strict definition, and I don't think it can be applied to the case of directly copying the output of an LLM -- because plagiarism refers to copying the work of another author, and I don't think LLMs are generally regarded (so far) as being able to have this kind of 'authorhood'.
if I copy entire article from the Economist, did I plagiarize!? There is no author attribution so we don’t know the author… Many articles in media today are LLM generated (fully or partially), can I copy those if someone sticks there name as author?!
bottom line is - you didn’t do the work but copied it from elsewhere, you plagiarized it, period
Yes, if you present yourself as its author.
Then did he represent it as his own work?
"the process or practice of using another person's ideas or work and pretending that it is your own"
What I am objecting to is the "another person's" part. An LLM is not a person, it is a tool -- a tool that is trained on other people's work, yes.
If you use a different tool like DeepL, which is also trained on other people's work, to produce text purely from an original prompt you give it (i.e. translate something you wrote yourself), and you put that into your paper... is that then plagiarism as well? If not, what if you use an LLM to do the translation instead, instructing it to act strictly as a 'translation tool'?
It seems to me, the mere act of directly copying the output of an LLM into your own work without a reference cannot be considered plagiarism (in every case), unless LLMs are considered people.
Of course, you can prompt an LLM in a way that copying its output would _definitely_ be plagiarism (i.e., asking it to quote the Declaration of Independence verbatim, and then simply copying that).
So, all I'm saying is: The distinction is not that clear, has nuances, and depends on the context.
It'd be the same as if I had Google Translate do my German 101 exam. I even typed the word "germuse" with my own two thumbs!
If you used Google Translate for your German 101 exam, that would be academic dishonesty/cheating, but not plagiarism.
Fair enough. We disagree about definitions here. To me, plagiarizing is claiming authorship of a work that you did not author. Where that work came from is irrelevant to the question.
> If not, whatif you use an LLM to do the translation instead, instructing it to act strictly as a 'translation tool'?
Translation is an entirely different beast, though. A translation is not claiming to be original authorship. It is transparently the opposite of that. Nobody translating a work would claim that they wrote that work.
Why is translation a different beast? It produces text based on a prompt you give it, and it draws from vast amounts of the works of other people to do so. So if a translation tool does not change the 'authorship' of the underlying text (i.e., if it would have been plagiarism to copy the text verbatim before translating it, it would be plagiarism after; and the same for the inverse), then it should also be possible for an LLM to not change the authorship between prompt and output. Which means, copying the output of an LLM verbatim is not necessarily in itself plagiarism.
No, it doesn't. First of all, dictionaries aren't prescriptive and so all quoting a definition does is clarify what you mean by a word. That can be helpful toward understanding, of course.
That said, the intransitive verb form of the word does not require "somebody else's work" in the sense of that "someone else" being a human.
> to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source
According to this, what it means is taking credit for a work you did not produce. That work did not have to be produced by a human, it merely had to exist.
> Why is translation a different beast?
Because it doesn't produce a new work, it just changes the language that work is expressed in. "Moby Dick" is "Moby Dick" regardless of what language it has been translated to. This is why the translator (human or otherwise) does not become the author of the work. If you were to run someone else's novel through a translator and claimed you wrote that work, you would in every respect be committing plagiarism both by the plain meaning of the word and legally.
> copying the output of an LLM verbatim is not necessarily in itself plagiarism.
Yes, it is. You would be taking credit for something you did not author. You would be doing the same if you took credit for a translation of someone else's work.
This is exactly what it is ... the post is taking "another person's" waaaay to literally - especially given that we are in the year of our Lord 2024/2025. One of the author's comments above is also discarding Encyclopedia argument stating that they are written by people which cannot ever be factually proven (I can easily ask LLM to create an Encyclopedia and publish it). Who is "another person" on a Wikipedia page?! "bunch of people" ... how is LLM trained? "bunch of people, bunch of facts, bunch of ____"
The crux of this whole "argument" isn't that plagiarism is "another person's work" it is that you are passing work as YOURS that isn't YOURS - it is that simple.
Let's assume I used an encyclopedia outside of my native tongue. I took the passage verbatim, used a tool to translate it to my native tongue, and passed it off as my own. The translation tool is clearly not a person, and I've even transformed the original work. I might escape detection, but this is still plagiarism.
Do you not agree?
Let's go to how Cambridge University defines it academically:
> Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the work of others as if this were your own original work.
> A student may be found guilty of an act of plagiarism irrespective of intent to deceive.
And let's go to their specific citation for the use of AI in research:
> AI does not meet the Cambridge requirements for authorship, given the need for accountability. AI and LLM tools may not be listed as an author on any scholarly work published by Cambridge
(Also, the last quote you included seems to directly support my argument)
If I used a Markov Chain (arguably a very early predecessor to today's models) trained on relevant data to write the passage, would that be any different? What about a RNN? What would you qualify as the threshold we need to cross for the tool to not be to be plagiarism?
I don’t see where they said (or implied) that.
How does “that isn’t plagiarism” imply “I can copy it with impunity”? Copyright infringement is still a thing.
Have you conflated plagiarism with copyright infringement? Neither implies the other. You can plagiarize without committing copyright infringement, and you can violate copyright without plagiarism.
This. We should apply this sort of logic in most situations, penalize for the actual 'crime', worrying about the meaningless details outside of that is just a distraction that confuses the issue.
Why is it any different in this case?
How about just don't cheat?
>The incident occurred in December 2023 when RNH was a junior. The school determined that RNH and another student "had cheated on an AP US History project by attempting to pass off, as their own work, material that they had taken from a generative artificial intelligence ('AI') application," Levenson wrote. "Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations)."
Glad the courts didn’t grant a similar “affluenza” ruling here. The student plagiarized, short and simple.
The article hints at a worry about college applications by the student. So perhaps this was an attempt to clean the student's slate of the cheating record. Still, I can't support the approach taken.
100% agree. Plus it diverts school resources -- in other words, taxpayer money -- to fight the court case, meaning they have less to spend on educating children which is what taxpayer's are funding.
The parents should be on the hook for the school's legal fees.
Ob XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1414/
Sounds cool.
But then, my brother was already into D&D in the late 80s back when I was learning to read from the Commodore 64 user manual, so of course I'd think that :P
Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believe their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes and emoji are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.
Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.
Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.
But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.
And the kid was even offered a redo!
On the other hand, the school caved on National Honor Society after the parents filed. So maybe the best move would have been (tactically, not as a parent) to show the school the draft complaint but never file it.
Filing the lawsuit is an asymmetric bet:
- win, and increase college admissions odds
- lose, and be no worse off that without the suit
This kid should change his name, given his initials, high school and parents’ names are public record next to a four brain cell cheating attempt.
Perhaps a business idea?
College admissions, no. College students and colleagues and employers, being able to use a search engine, absolutely.
It’s easy to miss, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes up as “Hingham High School Harris” brings up the relevant info. Further, his parents suing may be a larger issue for a college than his behavior.
This guy needs to go to a JuCo that feeds into a decent state school — he’s screwed for competitive schools.
Zero effect on his college outcomes. Got into really good schools.
> win and increase college admissions odds + also gain funds for the parents
If I were in college admissions then I'd probably think twice about admitting the candidate with a widely reported history of trying to sue their school on frivolous grounds when things don't go their way.
I saw lots of students acting a bit like this but I was grateful that I could dedicate myself primarily to my schooling and took as much advantage as I could to learn as much as I could.
The credential gets used as a heuristic for the learning you do but if you show up and don't have and knowledge, then everything is harder and your labor more fruitless.
I know some people don't care and that there are degenerate workplaces but you'll still be left with having been a lot less useful in your life than you were capable of being.
Will it, though? Like if the college happens to know about this incident?
wouldn't this decrease? I wouldn't want to admit a litigious cheating student - whether won or lost. this was a pure money play by the parents
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69190839/harris-v-adams...
I was expecting the bad press coverage to hurt his college chances since there were several articles online about him getting kicked out for cheating and then suing.
Nope! Dude got into a really good school. He even ended up texting asking me for past essays I wrote to turn in as his own to his college classes.
And the kicker was he then transferred to one of the prestigious military academies that supposedly upholds honor and integrity.
So. There is almost zero downside for suing even if it gets you tons of negative publicity.
- The family potentially has the financial resources or possibly connections to 'make things happen'.
- Perhaps the student is especially charismatic and was able to somehow right the situation. Some people have that con-artist mindset where they're able to cheat/commit fraud through their life with seemingly minimal consequences.
- Perhaps they just got lucky and the administration didn't do their due diligence.
Are universities supposed to google every applicant?
I mean I haven't been in academia for a decade, but back when I was I certainly never browsed a 17-year-old girl's instagram before making an admission decision.
Instagram? No (although, wouldn't be surprised)... but doing a gut check with the school admin and looking at public records? Sure.
> He even ended up texting asking me for past essays I wrote to turn in as his own ...
> he then transferred to one of the prestigious military academies ...
>> There is almost zero downside for suing even if it gets you tons of negative publicity.
Sounds like the caveat here should be, "when your parents/family is connected".
The student still received a passing grade for the assignment despite some of the assignment being AI hallucinated text. From my experience, plagiarism is an automatic zero for the entire assignment or course, but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process.
That's a good point: in this particular case, the teacher of the course was subpoenaed to federal court and compelled to testify about their grading. Incredible burden, for someone else's problem.
The whole system is set up to disincentivize any effort to actually hold students accountable for cheating in a significant way (fail assignment, fail course, expulsion, etc.)
When we read about cases of students being held accountable it's generally the exception not the rule.
I guess so.
ETA: "Academic dishonesty" also covers things like falsifying data and willfully misattributing sources, which is a closer approximation to this case.
What I find ridiculous is the parents are suing over a C+ vs B grade and a detention on the record. Like where do you see your cheating kid going in life that you're going to waste your resources and the district resources on this?
None of this is true.
Grades are just one part of the picture.
The folks who think a B is what kept them out of an elite school are just engaging in wishful thinking.
The number of people who get into elite schools like Harvard or Stanford with multiple Bs would surprise you.
"good story" probably doesn't include being too uninterested to write your own answers despite parents so committed to you going to Stanford they're prepared to litigate to get you a B...
So true.
This kid is a persona non grata for elite schools at this point.
As I said in the other thread, his best bet is to go to a JuCo that feeds into a decent state school, and just lay low for two years.
He can go to an elite school for a graduate degree if he wants the club membership.
Flip that, and you’re closer to correct for everyone.
You have to do something truly extraordinary to get in, with the things you listed as being some of the least common types.
Grades just need to be directionally correct rather than perfect.
Also, a side note about legacy admits…
While the admission rate of legacies is about 33% at Harvard (12% at Yale, 30% at Princeton, and 14% at Stanford), that doesn’t mean that being a legacy was the primary reason they got in.
First, 67% of legacies still get denied — that’s quite a bit.
Second, the folks who get into elite schools often know how to raise their kids in a way that increases their chances to get into an elite school. It’s an advantage, but much more often than not, the applicant put in the effort to make themselves a strong applicant.
The legacy “advantage” comes into play almost purely at the margin, when someone is borderline admit/waitlist or waitlist/deny, and the legacy status will push them to the favorable side. You’re not going to see a substantial difference in the folks who were rated comparably.
People seem to want it to be that legacies are freeloading off of their parents and aren’t really qualified admits, and that largely isn’t true. The exceptions are examples like z-list applicants (which you mentioned) or recruited athletes who also happen to be legacies.
[0] https://www.popehat.com/p/an-anti-slapp-victory ("An Anti-SLAPP Victory")
See, there's stuff even geniuses dont know.
> John Doe (male) and Jane Doe (female) are multiple-use placeholder names that are used in the British and US-American legal system and aside generally in the United Kingdom and the United States when the true name of a person is unknown or is being intentionally concealed.
I'd imagine that could lead to some difficulties when someone really named Jane Doe has to deal with some system that uses that name as a placeholder. Similar to the way people whose surname is Null sometimes run into problems because of poorly written computer systems.
in this case, the ai should publish the cited hallucinated works on amazon to make it real.
not that it would help us, but the ai will have its bases covered.
How do you get them to dive into a subject and actually learn about it?
Giving out purely take-home writing assignments with no in-class component (in an age where LLMs exist), is akin to giving out math assignments without a requirement to show your work (in an age where calculators exist).
Many years before LLMs were ever a thing, I recall being required to complete (and turn in) a lot of our research and outlining in class. A plain "go home and write about X topic" was not that common, out of fear of plagiarism.
Part of teaching is getting kids to learn why and how things are done, even if they can be done better/faster/cheaper with new technology or large scale industrial facilities. It's not easy, but I think it's the most important part of education: getting kids to understand the subjacent abstract ideas behind what they're doing, and learning that there's value in that understanding. Don't really want to dichotomize, but every other way kids will just become non-curious users of magic black boxes (with black boxes being computers, societal systems, buildings, infrastructure, supply chains, etc).
But don't copy/paste AI generated content in the same way that you don't copy/paste a chapter from a book and pass it off as your own.
You largely don't. Of course you try to motivate them. And it does work on some, mostly out of fear of an authoritarian institution that's setting the course for their life, rather than conveying the intrinsic value of the pursuit. And the rest is just glorified day-care.
Poor kid.
However, if the punishment is excessively severe, then the punishment would be wrong.
what does this mean if the judge already ruled in the school's favor? parents will appeal?
On one hand, the school referenced academic honesty policy in their defense, but there are no international standards for referencing AI, many AI detection measures have false positives, and they both disallow and allow the same behavior seemingly based upon the teacher's discretion.
If you were a malign individual in a position of authority (i.e. the classic teacher being out to get a troublemaker), you could easily set up circumstances that are unprovable under these guidelines.
There is also a vested interest in academia to not create a hostile work environment, where there is no duty to investigate. They are all in it together. This has been an ongoing problem for academia for decades.
There were also several very prejudicial aspects referenced, such as the revision changes, but some people write their stuff out in paper first, and then copy what's written into a document from there. This is proof of nothing because its apples to oranges.
Finally, there are grievances made about lack of due process, and other arbitrary matters which are all too common in academia, but academia makes it very difficult to be caught in such matters short of recording every little thing, which may potentially be against the states laws.
For example, you may be given written instructions for an assignment that are unclear, and ask for clarification, and the teacher may say something contradictory. Should students be held accountable for a teacher lying verbally (if it happened)?
It is sad that it had to come down to court, but that is just how academia operates with free money from the government. They don't operate under a standard business loss function, nor do they get rid of teachers who don't perform once they reach permanent faculty status. The documentary waiting for superman really drives this home, and its only gotten worse since that documentary came out.
There are plenty of people in the comments who are just rabid against the parents, and that's largely caused by poor journalism seeking to rile people up into irrational fanatic fervor. These people didn't look at the details, they just hopped on the bandwagon.
Be rational, and realize that academia has been broken for decades, and what you read isn't necessarily the whole truth of the matter.
The parents had several valid points which went ignored because there is no smoking gun, and that is how corruption works in centralized systems, and indicates a rule by law rather than a rule of law.
I made dozens of dollars selling book reports and history papers to my fellow honors class peers. Every paper was a virtually unaltered copy & paste job from Microsoft Encarta. Copy, paste into word, format using some “fancy font”, add my “customers” name, date and class to the top… print! Boom. Somebody buys me lunch.
I mean how else was I gonna have time to write shitty Visual Basic programs that used every custom control I could download in order to play/pause the CDROM’s music stuff?
Overall my html/css/javascript skills I feel now aren't as valuable as they were.
I guess in this instance I cheated too or is it that my developer peers haven't gotten into using GPT or they are more moral? As well maybe this is just the new normal....
No you were not cheating, you did what was expected from you. But you knew that.
The goal in school is to learn things. To learn to write you can't just copy an article from a paper and say it is yours. You have not learned.
At work, the goal is to get things done.
As well if one generation is using AI to get things done why wouldn't a younger generation do the same? Do as I say and not as I do.. that never has held well over time.
I think while we may think “they need to learn the subject first…” do they really? and if they do why? e.g. someone teaching their kid “web development” in soon-to-be 2025 is insane given the tools we have now… so while there are things for sure kids should learn it is not easy to figure out what those things actually are
"I need to create a dropdown for a website can you help me make it?"
And then I asked,
"How do I make what you wrote above work?"
It detailed the things one needs to do ..copy/paste each block of code in three separate notepad files and save each one accordingly (index.html, style.css and script.js) all in one folder. Once that's done double click on the index.html to run the dropdown.
It’s just a passing internet comment missing all the context, so what do I know.
And the saddest thing is, the fools think it'll work in their favor, and won't blowback with massive unintended consequences.