What's sad is that the school district spending its limited money to fight frivolous lawsuits like these directly impacts all other students who are just trying to get a good education. Stuff like this won't stop unless the helicopter parents are made to pay the school's legal bills.
Sadly, the parents could still win. What a precedent that would be. Though I'm not sure there's any avoiding a future with mass societal atrophy of reading and writing skills.
In the midst of the perennial "woe the kids today" rant, it's worth considering that this generation is the first generation in the 300,000 year history of homo sapiens sapiens to widely utilize reading and writing as a primary means of daily communication.
Yes, they'll be able grasp the beauty of Les Misérables or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire so long as it is fed to them as a stream of <280 character tweets, dohohoho.
Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believes their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.
Reading/writing part of the brain is the repurposed part which otherwise responsible for the faces, facial emotions, etc. recognition. Giving the already noticeable decrease of the in-person skills in the young "texting" generations we can speculate where it may go.
I once had a student in a U.S. history class that literally copy-pasted almost the entirety of a paper from a Wikipedia article (incidentally, an article that was only tangentially related to what he was supposed to write about, which only made it more glaringly obvious something was wrong). After confronting him he told me he "had no clue" how the copying could have happened! I gave him a 0 on the paper, which caused him to fail the course, and reported the incident. But the school admins changed his grade so that he would pass. This was at a for-profit college that thankfully no longer exists (I quit after that experience).
I think it depends. At least at the major public university I went to grad school at, if an undergrad had pulled that there would have been extremely serious repercussions. Failing the class would have been the minimum. The bigger issue then was that students with money could just buy their papers and take-home work, which was often impossible to catch. This was before LLMs started hurting paper mills' bottom lines, and a lot has changed in the past few years though.
It's high school, and a public one at that. Cheating can be rampant in some schools or with some individuals.
What I find ridiculous is the parents are suing over a C+ vs B grade and a detention on the record. Like where do you see your cheating kid going in life that you're going to waste your resources and the district resources on this?
> he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment
The student still received a passing grade for the assignment despite some of the assignment being AI hallucinated text. From my experience, plagiarism is an automatic zero for the entire assignment or course, but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process.
I have had the rare privilege to see up close examples of how at several US universities, when professors are presented with irrefutable proof that a student has cheated (well beyond any reasonable doubt) the professor will most often do nothing. In the best case they will meet with the student and give them a stern talking to.
The whole system is set up to disincentivize any effort to actually hold students accountable for cheating in a significant way (fail assignment, fail course, expulsion, etc.)
When we read about cases of students being held accountable it's generally the exception not the rule.
- "but there are tons of counterexamples when the teacher/professor doesn't want to deal with the academic integrity process"
That's a good point: in this particular case, the teacher of the course was subpoenaed to federal court and compelled to testify about their grading. Incredible burden, for someone else's problem.
Is it plagiarizing when you copy stuff that isn't even factual?
Merriam-Webster:
> : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source
The parents asked for a preliminary injunction to remove the cheating from the kids record. A judge could do this prior to trial if he believes the suit likely to succeed. The judge refused the injunction because he believes the school district was likely acting in good faith and did nothing illegal.
Oh, I see, so the case is still going to court. What a waste of taxpayer money. Elon wants to cut government waste? Make it more difficult to sue by setting a higher bar by which your suit can even be accepted.
While the parents assert the C+ might keep their kid out of Stanford, the more likely impact is that being known for a nationally notorious lawsuit over a minor infraction is what will keep him out of Stanford.
> Also, he's not getting into Stanford with the B grade that the parents are suing for anyway. You can't even get into Stanford with all A's these days.
None of this is true.
Grades are just one part of the picture.
The folks who think a B is what kept them out of an elite school are just engaging in wishful thinking.
The number of people who get into elite schools like Harvard or Stanford with multiple Bs would surprise you.
I think you might get in with multiple Bs and a good story about your interest in the subject you're pursuing (or suitably connected family)
"good story" probably doesn't include being too uninterested to write your own answers despite parents so committed to you going to Stanford they're prepared to litigate to get you a B...
Anecdotally (with truck load of anecdotes), Asian-Americans (to be specific) frequently seem to be held to a widely-known standard that either they aren’t aware of or don’t believe in.
Note that this is not exclusive to Asian-Americans — plenty of upper-middle class white people fall into this category as well — but that was the group you mentioned.
I have made an open offer to HN, and it still holds:
If you show me the application of an Asian that you felt was held to a different standard for elite school admissions, then I will give you the reason why they most likely didn’t get in.
Back when I was in high school CD-ROMs were brand new and you could buy encyclopedias on disc.
I made dozens of dollars selling book reports and history papers to my fellow honors class peers. Every paper was a virtually unaltered copy & paste job from Microsoft Encarta. Copy, paste into word, format using some “fancy font”, add my “customers” name, date and class to the top… print! Boom. Somebody buys me lunch.
I mean how else was I gonna have time to write shitty Visual Basic programs that used every custom control I could download in order to play/pause the CDROM’s music stuff?
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