There’s consequences for cheating?
Parent Terrible
A boy attending Hingham High School in Massachusetts got caught red-handed copying and pasting answers generated by an AI chatbot into his homework assignment, earning him a failing grade and a stint in detention. (Mercifully, he was allowed to redo the parts he cheated on.)
His mom and dad, though, decided that this was some sort of cosmic injustice. Rather than use this as an opportunity to teach their kid about the wrongs of plagiarism, the parents — Dale and Jennifer Harris — fearful of their son’s college prospects, threatened to sue the school.
The couple probably expected the school’s administrators to cave to the fear of litigation — but they didn’t.
The case has gone to court, and unfortunately for the boy’s overbearing parents, isn’t exactly going their way, Ars Technica reports.
Not So Fast
As part of their lawsuit, the Harris family filed a motion demanding that the judge issue an injunction to the school that would force it to remove the incident from their son’s disciplinary record, and to give the boy, only identified by his initials RNH in the court documents, a better grade. Because, as Jennifer argued, “they basically punished him for a rule that doesn’t exist,” she told WCVB last month.
The judge presiding over the case, Paul Levenson at the Massachusetts District Court, didn’t see it that way. On Monday, he issued an order that shot down their motion for an injunction.
“On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH had cheated,” Levenson wrote in the order, as quoted by Ars.
According to the court order, the kiddo submitted a script for a school project that lifted entire passages of texts generated by an AI tool provided by the popular grammar checker Grammarly. He was caught after the AI detector Turnitin — itself not without issues — flagged his work, leading his history teacher to look through it more carefully.
Among other damning clues, she found that the text cited nonexistent sources — a common form of AI hallucinations. RNH didn’t say that he used Grammarly or any other AI tool when he turned in his work.
Spelling It Out
What’s striking is that the parents don’t deny that their kid used a large language model, though they maintain he simply used it for research instead of straight up cribbing its work. Instead, they argue — rather speciously — that the school’s student handbook didn’t explicitly forbid the use of AI, per WCVB.
While technically true, the handbook does forbid unauthorized uses of technology in general, according to Ars. Firing back, the school also said that every student was given a copy of its AI policy, which does explicitly proscribe the use of AI tools for most types of school work and examinations.
It sounds like a pretty open and shut case, but the lawsuit is still ongoing. As Ars notes, however, the fact that Levenson shot down the injunction is a sign that he thinks the defendants have the stronger case.
More on AI: OpenAI “Accidentally” Deleted Evidence From Its New York Times Lawsuit
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