Policy

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.

The Harris’ motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials “have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law.”

“On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris’ son, referred to by his initials] had cheated,” Levenson wrote. “Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants’ considerable discretion in such matters.”

“On the evidence currently before the Court, I detect no wrongdoing by Defendants,” Levenson also wrote.

Students copied and pasted AI “hallucinations”

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).”

They received failing grades on two parts of the multi-part project but “were permitted to start from scratch, each working separately, to complete and submit the final project,” the order said. RNH’s discipline included a Saturday detention. He was also barred from selection for the National Honor Society, but he was ultimately allowed into the group after his parents filed the lawsuit.

School officials “point out that RNH was repeatedly taught the fundamentals of academic integrity, including how to use and cite AI,” Levenson wrote. The magistrate judge agreed that “school officials could reasonably conclude that RNH’s use of AI was in violation of the school’s academic integrity rules and that any student in RNH’s position would have understood as much.”

Levenson’s order described how the students used AI to generate a script for a documentary film:

The evidence reflects that the pair did not simply use AI to help formulate research topics or identify sources to review. Instead, it seems they indiscriminately copied and pasted text that had been generated by Grammarly.com (“Grammarly”), a publicly available AI tool, into their draft script. Evidently, the pair did not even review the “sources” that Grammarly provided before lifting them. The very first footnote in the submission consists of a citation to a nonexistent book: “Lee, Robert. Hoop Dreams: A Century of Basketball. Los Angeles: Courtside Publications, 2018.” The third footnote also appears wholly factitious: “Doe, Jane. Muslim Pioneers: The Spiritual Journey of American Icons. Chicago: Windy City Publishers, 2017.” Significantly, even though the script contained citations to various sources—some of which were real—there was no citation to Grammarly, and no acknowledgement that AI of any kind had been used.

Tool flagged paper as AI-generated

When the students submitted their script via Turnitin.com, the website flagged portions of it as being AI-generated. The AP US History teacher conducted further examination, finding that large portions of the script had been copied and pasted. She also found other damning details.

History teacher Susan Petrie “testified that the revision history showed that RNH had only spent approximately 52 minutes in the document, whereas other students spent between seven and nine hours. Ms. Petrie also ran the submission through ‘Draft Back’ and ‘Chat Zero,’ two additional AI detection tools, which also indicated that AI had been used to generate the document,” the order said.

School officials argued that the “case did not implicate subtle questions of acceptable practices in deploying a new technology, but rather was a straightforward case of academic dishonesty,” Levenson wrote. The magistrate judge’s order said “it is doubtful that the Court has any role in second-guessing” the school’s determination, and that RNH’s plaintiffs did not show any misconduct by school authorities.

As we previously reported, school officials told the court that the student handbook’s section on cheating and plagiarism bans “unauthorized use of technology during an assignment” and “unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own work.”

School officials also told the court that in fall 2023, students were given a copy of a “written policy on Academic Dishonesty and AI expectations” that said students “shall not use AI tools during in-class examinations, processed writing assignments, homework or classwork unless explicitly permitted and instructed.”

The parents’ case hangs largely on the student handbook’s lack of a specific statement about AI, even though that same handbook bans unauthorized use of technology. “They told us our son cheated on a paper, which is not what happened,” Jennifer Harris told WCVB last month. “They basically punished him for a rule that doesn’t exist.”

Parents’ other claims rejected

The Harrises also claim that school officials engaged in a “pervasive pattern of threats, intimidation, coercion, bullying, harassment, and intimation of reprisals.” But Levenson concluded that the “plaintiffs provide little in the way of factual allegations along these lines.”

While the case isn’t over, the rejection of the preliminary injunction shows that Levenson believes the defendants are likely to win. “The manner in which RNH used Grammarly—wholesale copying and pasting of language directly into the draft script that he submitted—powerfully supports Defendants’ conclusion that RNH knew that he was using AI in an impermissible fashion,” Levenson wrote.

While “the emergence of generative AI may present some nuanced challenges for educators, the issue here is not particularly nuanced, as there is no discernible pedagogical purpose in prompting Grammarly (or any other AI tool) to generate a script, regurgitating the output without citation, and claiming it as one’s own work,” the order said.

Levenson wasn’t impressed by the parents’ claim that RNH’s constitutional right to due process was violated. The defendants “took multiple steps to confirm that RNH had in fact used AI in completing the Assignment” before imposing a punishment, he wrote. The discipline imposed “did not deprive RNH of his right to a public education,” and thus “any substantive due process claim premised on RNH’s entitlement to a public education must fail.”

Levenson concluded with a quote from a 1988 Supreme Court ruling that said the education of youth “is primarily the responsibility of parents, teachers, and state and local school officials, and not of federal judges.” According to Levenson, “This case well illustrates the good sense in that division of labor. The public interest here weighs in favor of Defendants.”