The way I see AI as a tool in a classroom or learning setting is that you should be punished if you willingly used it due to laziness, not understanding the course work, or I assume most likely both. On its own it's not terrible (environment aside), but it's certainly not something I'd accept if I were a teacher grading homework.
Fuck AI
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
I hope him and his parents get bullied.
They want this kid to get into Stanford?? 🤣🤣🤣
He cheats from young. Great ivy shit material. Maybe if he rapes somebody he’ll get to be a supreme court justice.
connections over merit
If they had the connections, then the grade here wouldn't matter.
good point
What fucking snowflakes. When I was a kid, if you had someone write your paper for you, you got a 0 for the assignment. When you go to college, they'll fail you out of the course for that shit (because its cheating).
The only ones harming this kid's future is the parents trying to coddle their kid and protect them from the (rather light) consequences of their actions.
I taught in Chinese universities for 16 years. Initially I liked it. The students were hard-working and respectful. Parents listened to teacher advice. If kids were caught cheating there was Hell to pay ... from the parents, not just the school.
Over that 16 year period, though, everything changed. Parents started showing up to middle schools whose response to any misconduct was to privately donate red portraits of Chairman Mao to the school administrators and suddenly all records of misconduct went missing. Marks were "reassessed". Leading to universities being flooded by the worst imaginable students who'd never had a negative effect to any shenanigans their entire lives.
Only universities are a different world entirely. It takes a whole lot more red portraits of Chairman Mao to get misconduct erased in university. Way more such portraits than all but the top 0.1% could pay. So these poor kids, having slid by for 12 years of no consequences suddenly get hit square between the eyes with consequences that for the first time in their lives Daddy couldn't erase by waving said red portraits around.
Yes, they were little shits. Yes, I hated them as students. But I still felt bad for them as people because they were made monsters. They weren't born monsters.
Still didn't stop me from quitting teaching, though.
It's funny how this reads like a typical "China bad" comment but goes on to show how economic inequality ruins society.
Not doubting or criticising you at all, just observing that "communist China" has very capitalist problems. If only they were more communist
China is not communist. It has never claimed to be communist. (Nor had the USSR made such a claim.)
"Communist" countries are, properly termed, "socialist" states because in Marxist theory (grossly simplified) the development is Capitalist->Socialist->Communist. In a socialist state the Communist Party is intended to shepherd people along the path to communism. Once communism is achieved, there is no need for a government. As such, the very term "communist government" is an oxymoron.
So China is a "socialist state". And socialist states, in communist theory, are not about "free medical care" or whatnot, like the "social democracies" of the west (like, say, Sweden) are about. Socialism, in Marxist terminology, is a very specific thing that has nothing to do with free state services (though those may be a desirable byproduct of them). And, get this, socialist states may use capitalist tools to accomplish their ends. It's just that capitalism in a socialist state is a tool used by the state, and is also under its thumb (which is why billionaires in China fear government; government in the USA, by contrast, fears billionaires).
That being said, yes, there's huge swaths of inequality in China, and education in particular is currently being massacred by it. The government attacks inequality fitfully here and there, but there does need to be a more concerted and forceful effort for it to actually work.
(Of course, with my more anarchistic leanings, I'm pretty certain that the socialist phase is a regressive concept that will never end because the people who run socialist governments really like this feeling of being in power so won't be giving it up anytime soon.)
The best parts of Actually Existing Socialism are commodity production and a centralized state!
OK, the parents are suing. And the district already filed a motion to dismiss.
Please understand, the world isn't a nuts as the headlines tell us. Judges toss frivolous lawsuits all day long. We only hear about the nut cases because they're nut cases. Money says this case is never heard.
Money says this case is never heard
Considering how many kids get into Ivy League schools purely because of who their parents are and/or home much money they donate, you’re most certainly right
I know, this stuff only gets published because it makes people mad enough to share it and leave comments.
But it works, I kinda hate these parents.
He didn't do the assignment. Those parents can get bent.
But I heard the kid was responsible for writing all the material the AI was trained on!
/s
"a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools."
No, using AI tools harmed his chances...
What would the parents' stance be if he'd asked someone else to write his assignment for him?
Same thing.
Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments
I'll bet you the student handbook doesn't explicitly prohibit taking a shit on his desk, but he'd sure as Hell be disciplined for doing it. This whole YOU DIDN'T EXPLICITLY PROHIBIT THIS SO IT'S FINE!!!111oneoneeleventy! thing that a certain class of people have is, to my mind, a clear sign of sociopathy.
Also known as the Air Bud defense.
Basically their stance is that the school policy didn't explicitly say he couldn't use AI, so perhaps the policy specifically mentions another person doing the assignment?
their stance is that the school policy didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t use AI,
According to the school's lawyers, the policy against AI was stated in a presentation that the student attended, and the policy against AI was handed out at a parent's night and on an online portal, see pg 4-6 of the following: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.275605/gov.uscourts.mad.275605.13.0.pdf
Hah! So it's even worse! It actually was explicitly prohibited and the parents are still suing!
Definite cluster of sociopathy there.
You know, now that I think about it, if I were in an admissions office I'd be keeping a quiet database of news stories like this so I know which people I would automatically reject no matter what their scores.
I probably wouldn’t go to the trouble of making a database of students who might never apply to my school, but now I’m wondering about the legality of background checks or even cursory Google searches as part of the admissions process, because it would surely show up there.
Yep, make that part of their so called permanent record.
If you work in a job for a year or more (sometimes less), it will become very clear which of your co-workers cheated their way through school. They're the absolute worst to deal with professionally, and I hate them for constantly producing slop.
They didn't even give him the 0 he deserved?
Right? He didn't earn the knowledge for himself (which is the whole point of school) so he was lucky, IMO, to even get that undeserved 65.
It's been a while since teachers were allowed to give out 0s in highschool. When I taught 12 years ago the lowest I was allowed to give was a 65. Even if nothing was turned in.
I can't imagine how bad of a student I would have been if "literally don't do it" was a 65. That's insane.
"Literally don't do it" is a 65 and you have the rest of the heading period to make up or redo any assignment up until the last day. So basically, float through 9 weeks doing nothing, then cream in the easiest assignments after school during the last week to get a passing grade.
Ah, ~~No~~ Child Left Behind working as intended.
I imagine this must depend on the location of the school in question. Im in my mid 20s, so my high school experience was more recent than 12 years ago, but I remember getting quite a few zeros (was an absolutely horrible procrastinator who would tend to respond to the stress of having a due date coming up by doing anything else to not think about the source of said stress, which led to a lot of simply not turned in schoolwork)
Dude, the fact that the student has to use AI tools to get by, does not mean he's going to be a success story in life. It just means he's going to find shortcuts and exploits to make things easier over everyone else that had to do things the natural way. This is no different than someone using calculators in math tests where it's not allowed. This is no different than someone simply peeking over another's work and copying down. Using AI generative tools to gain an advantage is in the same ballpark.
So these entitled parents and that entitled student can go get fucked. I hope these universities see this and recognize that this student is a borderline cheater and hopefully deny him anyways if this gets overturned.
I'd say more than borderline cheater but yeah.
Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.
Kid learns nothing by cheating on the assignment.
Well, at least the bad grade and detention will be a teachable moment.
Parents: Hold my daytime wine.
These fucking dickbrain parents. What do they think, they win the lawsuit and Stanford doesn’t realize the kid took a shortcut?
Then they’ll sue Stanford.
why send your kid to school tho if you think they can just solve everything by AI
Don't give them any ideas.
Because everything is awful, I fully expect to see "homeschooled by AI" within the next 2-3 years.
Shall I go on?
No, I'm depressed enough, thank you.
When I was a kid, we had a period of some repetitive math work I got sick of. So I wrote a TI-84 program to automate it, even showing its work I would write down.
I wasn't really supposed to do that, but my teacher had no problem with this. I clearly understood the work, and its not just punching the equation into WolframAlpha.
It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that. Like some really primitive offline LLM you were allowed to use in school for basic automation and assistance, but requires a lot of work to set up and is totally useless without it in. I can already envision ways to set this up with BERT or Llama 3B.
I wasn't really supposed to do that, but my teacher had no problem with this. I clearly understood the work, and its not just punching the equation into WolframAlpha.
This is the way it should be. If you created the program on your own, as opposed to copying it from elsewhere, you had to know how to do the work correctly in the first place. You've already demonstrated that you understand the process beyond just being able to solve a single equation. You then aren't wasting time "learning" something you've already learned just to finish an otherwise arbitrary number of problems.
It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that
It's called your brain / learning. That's why you're there. If the specifics of the curriculum are too tedious, that's on the school to address.
Learning how to parse and comprehend information to find an answer is just as important as the answer.
If the specifics of the curriculum are too tedious, that’s on the school to address.
This! This right here. So many school curricula are designed by people who seem to despise children and want to make them suffer that I wonder why we bother with schools at all sometimes.
(Of course I also refer to Chinese high schools as institutionalized child abuse, so what do I know?)