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.
The story is an eyeball grabber precisely because it is being pitched as “stupid entitled parents”.
Hingham High is regularly ranked as one of the best schools in the country, and has a reputation operating as a feeder into the Ivy League and similar tier universities. In these kinds of high-stakes environments, GPA and Class Rank are a form of commodity that parents (not unjustifiably) go to the mat to wrangle. The difference between admittance and denial to a school like Stanford can be hundreds of thousands a year in future professional income for the kid.
But that’s the real root of the problem here. A single grade on a single test in a single class determining a student’s entire socio-economic trajectory creates all sorts of moral hazards. One of which is parents willing to litigate over a grade.
Perhaps the problem isn’t with this particular pair of parents realizing the stakes, but with an increasingly steep pyramid of incomes based on where you enter the workforce.
Honestly this is a big reason I can’t root for our society in its current form.
Everyone in an area, barring diagnosed disability requiring special education, should go to the same PUBLIC schools to develop empathy with Americans who don’t live behind their guard gates, to have similar academic starting points if even a partial “meritocracy” is something we’d like to try to actually aspire to, and to reverse rich parents having no skin in the game and forcing them to advocate FOR public schools with their power rather than lobby to further destroy them for tax cuts because being greedy sociopaths is kind of their thing.
The idea that a child’s future prospects are so dependant on their parent’s socioeconomic status, rather than solely the child’s aptitude and motivation, makes this whole place nothing but a bad clown show to me. Feudalism with a marketing team.
In a country where intelligent and hard working children are lost to schools we starved to cut wealthy sociopath’s taxes, while dynastic entitled nitwits like George W Bush and Donald Trump literally cannot fail despite barely being able to walk without tripping on their own shoes or bankrupting yet another company, trying just makes one a sucker.
In theory, I’m right there with you. Everyone should go to the “Good School”. But then I’m sitting here in HISD, watching Mike Miles tear the fucking wiring out of the walls specifically to Own The Libs in Harris County for daring to elect a few municipal democrats. And I can’t help think, “Maybe forcing people to go to these child warehouses and low-grade torture facilities is bad aktuly”.
I feel this in my bones. But I also recognize this as a consequence of social networks that are built up over generations. It isn’t as though Bush and Trump (or Obama or Clinton) just appeared at the top of the administrative hierarchy by accident. They climbed (or were carried) through vast webs of political advocacy groups and donors and religious organizations.
Trying doesn’t make you a sucker. But understanding what you’re trying to accomplish (and who will assist/oppose your efforts) is important when you’re trying to gauge what will be successful or worthwhile.
I have my doubts that a student that uses generative AI to complete assignments would stand a chance at getting into an Ivy league school. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist student to know that using gen AI to write your assignment is cheating.
Elon partied his way through Stanford and now he’s one of the richest men on Earth. He built up a big bench of rich friends in Silicon Valley by getting all of them laid.
Bush Jr went to Yale after he couldn’t get into UTexas, earned his Gentlemen’s C, then ran off to become a millionaire with all his Saudi friends before running for Congress.
Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard once they got into the right business clubs. They raised enormous sums of money overnight for their projects and got them sold top shelf when it came time to IPO.
Admittance to the university means getting access to the right people. That’s what gives you the launch pad into the upper eschalons of society. GPA isn’t what matters at this level.