Student loses Court Case over Plagiarism and Use of AI

[jedishrfu]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules/

A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment.

Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge the incident from his disciplinary record before he needs to submit college applications. The parents argued that there was no rule against using AI in the student handbook, but school officials said the student violated multiple policies.

Notably, the school cites plagiarism and ethics rules after a teacher used AI to uncover the plagiarism of text generated by a Grammarly AI.

There were some fake book references and other issues with their project. The court didn't challenge the use of AI to identify AI. I suspect a good lawyer could have challenged that asking for proof in how it determined the text was written by AI.

In Texas, there was a case where a college prof used AI to look for AI generated reports in one of his assignments. He flunked all his students for it and jeopardized their graduation. It was later thrown out due to the inability of the tool to positively identify AI generated text.

https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...ssor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/

Dr. Jared Mumm, a campus rodeo instructor who also teaches agricultural classes, sent an email on Monday to a group of students informing them that he had submitted grades for their last three essay assignments of the semester. Everyone would be receiving an “X” in the course, Mumm explained, because he had used “Chat GTP” (the OpenAI chatbot is actually called “ChatGPT“) to test whether they’d used the software to write the papers — and the bot claimed to have authored every single one.

“I copy and paste your responses in [ChatGPT] and [it] will tell me if the program generated the content,” he wrote, saying he had tested each paper twice. He offered the class a makeup assignment to avoid the failing grade — which could otherwise, in theory, threaten their graduation status.

 

[nsaspook]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules/



Notably, the school cites plagiarism and ethics rules after a teacher used AI to uncover the plagiarism of text generated by a Grammarly AI.

There were some fake book references and other issues with their project. The court didn't challenge the use of AI to identify AI. I suspect a good lawyer could have challenged that asking for proof in how it determined the text was written by AI.

In Texas, there was a case where a college prof used AI to look for AI generated reports in one of his assignments. He flunked all his students for it and jeopardized their graduation. It was later thrown out due to the inability of the tool to positively identify AI generated text.

https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...ssor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/

OMG, these guys were cheating on AP U.S. History. All else aside, they are losers.

 

[BillTre]

OMG, these guys were cheating on AP U.S. History. All else aside, they are losers.

Sadly, no longer can we assume everyone has had much history before getting into college.

 

[vela]

After reading the article and learning more details of what happened, I find it really sad that these parents were willing to pursue a lawsuit over their son's blatant cheating. Great lesson for their son.

 

[jedishrfu]

That's sad and true. It reminds me of the YouTube video of the math teacher. In it, she marks a simple problem wrong. A student wrote that 2+2 = 22, and she said it was wrong.

The parents demanded a parent-teacher conference and reiterated the same thing. Finally, the principal gets involved and tells the teacher that, sadly, he has to let her go.

The final act is the best part.

 

[nuuskur]

That's like in the ballpark of where some students just blatantly copy several pages of text from someone else's work and call it a "quote" and then have the audacity to blame the uni for being gatekeepers and biased and blah blah for denying them their degree (it's oddly specific because that's what happened in our uni).

Even more bizarre is that the parents are suing over this. Great example of cutting corners to scare my students with