I would never allow a school to punish my kid on a non-school day, no matter what they may or may not have done.
So Saturday detention tended to be a thing you'd get sent to if you had a truly outrageous number of absences.
I believe there was a way for situations like serious illness where this rule doesn't apply. But let's be honest, most situations of excessive absences that I saw back in High School were NOT that.
In that sense, your kid isn't really being "punished" by receiving Saturday detention. It's just, the school doesn't have to advance them to the next grade level either if they missed like half the school days for the year and are under the minimum attendance. Like it or not, education in the United States is compulsory and part of that is that there is usually some kind of attendence policy. If you don't like it, then you can homeschool.
I think weekend detention would feel like detention for the teacher/monitor as well.
If you had to work you could get out of it that weekend. You’d still need to make it up and if you worked every weekend maybe you’d get another punishment.
The parents say that the student will suffer irreparable harm from the school’s punishment.
From the article:
> RNH was temporarily held back from joining the National Honor Society and parents want their offspring's academic records cleared of any mention of the incident. In addition, they want the student to receive a B grade for the project and the removal of any indication that cheating was involved.
The school’s defense is that students weren’t allowed to use AI for their research, and that the student failed to cite the AI as a source.
From the article:
> The school argues that RNH, along with his classmates, was given a copy of the student handbook in the Fall of last year, which specifically called out the use of AI by students.
> "RNH unequivocally used another author’s language and thoughts, be it a digital and artificial author, without express permission to do so," the school argues.
> "Furthermore, he did not cite to his use of AI in his notes, scripts or in the project he submitted. Importantly, RNH’s peers were not allowed to cut corners by using AI to craft their projects; thus, RNH acted 'unfairly in order to gain an advantage.'"
To be fair, the question is whether the student handbook's definition of cheating covered using AI.
Of course, the kid is almost certainly already rotten, given his parents couldn't find a better way to resolve this.
If I was handling this, I'd treat it the same as if somebody just copy pasted some text off Google search and didn't cite. I'm not sure I'd give the student a 0. But it wouldn't be a good grade and I'd have to read the paper to see the extent to which Id agree it rises to the level of cheating.
Completely agree with you on all of it, but, to let you know, sometimes there are school-wide policies on plagiarism that teachers have to follow. My highschool made teachers give an automatic 0 for any plagiarism.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/10/15/dismiss.pdf
The AI policy starts at the bottom of page 5. Students have to mention any use of AI, even generating ideas. They must include an appendix with "the entire exchange, highlighting the most relevant sections" and provide an explanation for how and why everything was used.
It seems overly strict to me, hastily written when ChatGPT became popular perhaps.
Pretty soon most students are going to be say "Hey Siri, help me with my homework it's about X" and get an AI answer - are they all academically dishonest?
The issue here is academic honesty, not necessarily the definition of "AI". Should a student using Grammarly submit all drafts of their work and cite the changes they didn't make? Should students receiving external help in the form of parents and tutors cite that assistance?
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing in an age when ubiquitous search and the internet democratize access to information resources. It's trivial to duplicate documents today, and It's no more of a burden to students to disclose how they are writing.
When I was growing up, teachers knew families who didn't have a home library or had only one car and didn't live near the library were at a disadvantage, so research periods were granted during class. Essays were written and turned in during class periods, and sudden changes to handwriting or style were easy to catch.
Today, the challenges are different, so it seems fair to change the requirements and criteria in response. I've advised friends in education to try assigning AI generated papers with citations as tests and ask students to correct them and expand them from sources.
Asking Siri whether information matches a particular source still isn't possible, and if you're going to have to go through the effort of compiling a bunch of sources for RAG, I think any student equipped to do that would also find it reasonably more efficient to simply do the work directly.
Let's also be perfectly clear that "Can you help me with homework about X" is probably not the question actually being asked. We know that these questions are just being pasted in verbatim. That is absolutely academic dishonesty.
This case is a little different. But let's not pretend that teachers in many subjects areny being taken advantage of and screwed over by these tools and students willing to use them. I'm sure they are all frustrated and willing to jump the gun against the slightest sign of this sort of thing. Tragedy of the commons situation, it's going to ruin academic culture in the US imo if there aren't extremely strict rules laid down and quickly.
I mean, it doesn't matter in the long run since academia will be as entirely AI driven as education soon enough, and the entire concept of "academic integrity" will be nothing but a quaint atavism from the days when the human in the loop was actually relevant, but yes.