University of Minnesota – ��Ӱ��

Students Blocked From Campus During COVID Want Refunds. Some Are Getting Them

Elaine S. Povich — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

This article was originally published in

Thousands of college students will get hundreds of dollars in compensation as colleges and universities move this summer to settle multimillion-dollar lawsuits stemming from canceled classes and activities during COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

While some of the class-action suits against the colleges and universities are still in litigation, and still others dismissed, several major cases have been settled in recent weeks.

The settlements mean students who were charged tuition and fees but weren’t able to use in-person services during the pandemic shutdowns will receive some compensation, though they won’t be refunded for all the on-campus amenities they lost.

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The amounts depend on the total settlement figure, minus legal fees and other court expenses. Each case has a different timeline.

Most recently, the University of Delaware agreed in June to set up a $6.3 million fund to partially reimburse tuition and fees that the students paid for classes, housing and activities in 2020. The students argued that they did not receive the full benefit of in-person participation in academics and extra-curricular activities. Each student is expected to receive as part of the agreement.

But the university did not admit wrongdoing and maintained that extenuating circumstances of the pandemic, and the lack of an official contract between the school and each student, meant it was justified in taking the tuition and fees — an argument made by many other schools.

Many universities also have argued that they incurred significant expense in making the almost immediate transition to online classes. In interviews with Stateline, attorneys for some schools argued that the students’ argument was undercut by the fact that many chose to remain in remote classes after the campuses reopened, for convenience or health concerns.

Florida attorney Mendy Halberstam, who was not involved in the Delaware case but who represents other universities that have been similarly sued, said in an interview that the schools feel compelled to defend themselves against cases they believe “are lacking in merit.”

“They are not looking to make life difficult for their students,” he said, “but they also have to make sure of their [lack of] liability.”

There have been about 300 such lawsuits, according to a British publication that partners with The Wall Street Journal on rankings and evaluations of U.S. schools.

The University of Colorado, for example, in April for $5 million.

Attorney Igor Raykin, who represented the Colorado students, said the settlement was “a reasonable offer given the challenges of the suit itself and the legal landscape in general.”

Among the challenges, Raykin said, is the fact that these were precedent-setting cases and that a lengthy legal process meant many of the students have already graduated and gotten on with their lives.

“We wanted to make sure the students would be getting something that would benefit them.” Individual awards will vary, he said, but typically will be in the hundreds of dollars.

In May, the University of Minnesota , allowing students to get bigger refunds of tuition and fees than the school initially allowed. And in June, a judge a group of students in a class-action suit against the University of Washington.

However, early this year a judge in Rhode Island against the University of Rhode Island and several other schools in that state, that there were no enforceable contracts breached in the shutdowns. The plaintiffs argued that the shutdowns denied them university experiences they expected, based on the schools’ marketing materials, websites, course catalogs, student handbooks and the like.

But U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled that, “unfortunately for [the] plaintiffs, these general advertisements and distinctions do not create obligations on the part of the university — they are vague and more akin to puffery, rather than enforceable promises.”

Two weeks ago, the Florida Supreme Court it would consider a class-action suit from University of Florida students asking for compensation for being denied services during the COVID-19 shutdown.

But in another Florida case, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals a ruling from a lower court dismissing a student’s lawsuit against the University of Miami, a private school.

The university refunded pro-rated fees for housing, dining, student centers and gyms. The student argued that wasn’t enough, but the court ruled that she was “not entitled to damages stemming from any alleged breach of contract, unjust enrichment, or inadequate refunds on the part of Miami.”

“The pandemic forced students of all ages to learn from behind their computer screens for a period of time, and we certainly harbor a great deal of sympathy for those students whose educations and relationships were affected by the transition,” the court wrote.

“We hope that some comfort can be found, however, in our certainty that despite enduring the hardships created by the pandemic, any student who has earned a degree from a school like the University of Miami retains the unspoiled potential for a fulfilling and prosperous future.”

Florida attorney Jeffrey Ostrow, who represented students in a lawsuit against Barry University, a private school in Miami, said the cases have been “a mixed bag all over the place.” In one of the earliest settlements, Barry University in September 2021 compensation fund for students.

Ostrow maintains that universities did enter contracts for in-person learning and campus activities.

“All these students signed up for a program in class,” he said, noting that schools often charged less for online classes before the pandemic. “Whether [the university] was forced to, or decided unilaterally to shut those things down, it’s not fair for them to keep the [in-class payments].”

He also noted that many schools got pandemic relief payments from the federal government to help them weather the pandemic.

“There was federal money that a lot of the schools were able to get,” Ostrow said. “And we believe that money should have gone back to the students.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

ChatGPT Scores a C+ At the University of Minnesota Law School. Now What?

Greg Toppo — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:28:00 +0000

Though computer scientists have been using chatbots to for more than 70 years, 2023 is fast becoming the year in which educators are realizing what artificial intelligence means for their work.

Over the past several weeks, they’ve been putting ’s through its paces on any number of professional-grade exams in law, medicine, and business, among others. The moves seem a natural development just weeks after the groundbreaking, free (for now) chatbot appeared. Now that nearly anyone can play with it, they’re testing how it performs in the real world — and figuring out what that might mean for both teaching skills like writing and critical thinking in K-12, and training young white-collar professionals at the college level.

Most recently, at the University of Minnesota Law School tested it on 95 multiple choice and 12 essay questions from four courses. It passed, though not exactly at the top of its class. The chatbot scraped by with a “low but passing grade” in all four courses, a C+ student.

But don’t get complacent, warned Daniel Schwarcz, a UM professor and one of the study’s authors. The AI earned that C+ “relative to incredibly motivated, incredibly talented students … and it was holding its own.”

Think of it this way, Schwarcz said: Plenty of C+ students at the university go on to graduate and pass the bar exam.

Daniel Schwarcz

ChatGPT debuted less than three months ago, and its respectable performance on several of these tests is forcing educators to quickly rethink how they evaluate students — assigning generic written essays, for instance, now seems like an invitation for fraud.

But it’s also, at a more basic level, forcing educators to reconsider how to help students see the value of learning to think through the material for themselves.

Before he encountered ChatGPT, Schwarcz typically gave open-book exams. What the new technology is making him think more deeply about is whether he was often testing memorization, not thinking. “If that’s the case, I’ve written a bad exam,” he said.

And like Schwarcz, many educators now warn: With improving technology, today’s middling chatbot is tomorrow’s valedictorian.

“If this kind of tool is producing a C+ answer in early 2023,” said Andrew M. Perlman, dean of Suffolk Law School in Boston, “what’s it going to be able to do in 2026?”

Fake studies and ‘human error’

Lawyers aren’t the only professionals in the chatbot’s crosshairs: In January, Christian Terwiesch, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, let it loose on the final exam of Operations Management, a “typical MBA core course” at the nation’s pre-eminent business school.

While the AI made several “surprising” math mistakes, Terwiesch wrote in the, it impressed him with its ability to analyze case studies, among other tasks. “Not only are the answers correct, but the explanations are excellent,” he wrote.

Its final grade: B to B-.

A Wharton colleague, Ethan Mollick, in December that he got the chatbot to write a syllabus for a new course, as well as part of a lecture. And it generated a final assignment with a grading rubric. But its tendency to occasionally deliver erroneous answers from its wide-ranging web searches, Mollick said, makes it more like an “omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you.”

Indeed, AI tools often create problems of their own. In January, Jeremy Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked ChatGPT to a 35-year-old woman with chest pains. The patient, he specified, takes birth control pills but has no past medical history.

After a few rounds of back-and-forth, the bot, which Faust cheekily referred to as “Dr. OpenAI,” said she was probably suffering from a pulmonary embolism. When Faust suggested it could also be costochondritis, a painful inflammation of the cartilage that connects rib to breastbone, ChatGPT countered that its diagnosis was supported by research, specifically a 2007 study in the .

Then it offered a citation for a paper that does not exist.

The AI platform has great potential for use in medicine, but has huge pitfalls, says Jeremy Faust, MD

While the journal is real — and a few of the researchers cited have published in it — the bot created the citation out of thin air, Faust wrote. “I’m a little miffed that rather than admit its mistake, Dr. OpenAI stood its ground, and up and confabulated a research paper.”

Confronted with its lie, the AI “said that I must be mistaken,” Faust wrote. “I began to feel like I was and that the computer was HAL-9000, blaming our disagreement on ‘human error.’”

Faust closed his computer.

A scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which a computer commandeers a space voyage. A Boston emergency room physician who watched recently as a modern AI created a fake medical study to support its diagnosis, said he felt like the astronauts in the movie. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)

‘Proof of original work’

Such bugs haven’t stopped educators from test-driving these tools for students and, in a few cases, for professionals.

Last December, just days after Open AI released ChatGPT, Perlman, the Suffolk dean, presented it with a series of legal prompts. “I was interested in just pushing it to its limits,” he said.

Perlman transcribed its mostly respectable replies and co-authored a with the chatbot.

Andrew M. Perlman

Peter Gault, founder of the AI literacy nonprofit Quill.org, which offers a free AI tool designed to help , said that even if teachers think things are moving fast this winter, the reality is that they are moving even faster than they seem. Case in point: An online “prompt engineering” channel on the social platform Discord, devoted to helping students improve their ChatGPT requests for better, more accurate results, now has about , he said. “There are tens of thousands of students just swapping tips for how to cheat in it,” he said.

Gault’s nonprofit, along with , has already debuted that helps educators sniff out the more formulaic writing that AI typically generates.

While other educators have suggested that future ChatGPT versions could feature a kind of digital watermarking that identifies cut-and-pasted AI text, Gault said that would be easy to circumvent with software that basically launders the text and removes the watermark. He suggested that educators begin thinking now about how they can use tools like Google Docs’ version history to reveal what he calls “proof of original work.”

Peter Gault, founder of Quill.org, talks to students. Gault’s nonprofit uses AI to help students improve their writing. (Courtesy of Peter Gault)

The idea is that educators can see all the writing and revising that go into student essays as they take shape. The typical student, he said, spends nine to 15 hours on a major essay. Google Docs and other tools like it can show that progression. Alternatively, if a student copies and pastes an essay or section from a tool like ChatGPT, he said, the software reveals that the student spent just moments on it.

“We have these tools that can do the thinking for us,” Gault said. “But as the tools get more sophisticated, we just really risk that students are no longer really investing in building intellectual skills. It’s a difficult problem to solve. But I do think it’s worth solving.”

‘Resistance is futile’

Minnesota’s Schwarcz flatly said law schools must train students on tools like ChatGPT and its successors. These tools “are not going away — they’re just going to get better,” he said. “And so in my mind, ultimately as educators, the fundamental thing is to figure out how to train students to use these tools both ethically and effectively.”

Perlman also foresees law schools using tools like ChatGPT and whatever comes next to train lawyers, helping them generate first drafts of legal documents, among other products, as they learn their trade.

In the end, AI could streamline lawyering, allowing attorneys to spend more time practicing “at the top of their license,” Perlman said, engaging in more sophisticated legal work for clients. This, he said, is the part of the job lawyers find most enjoyable — and clients find most valuable.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/��Ӱ��

It could also make such services more affordable and thus more available, Perlman said. So even as educators focus on the technology’s threat, “I think we are quickly going to have to pivot and think about how we teach students to use these tools to enable them to deliver their services better, faster and cheaper in the future.”Perlman joked that the best way to think about the future of AI in the legal profession is to remember that old “Star Trek” maxim: “ ‘.’ This technology is coming, and I think we ignore it at our peril — and we try to resist at our peril.”

Ask the Doctor: Navigating the “New Math” of Omicron in Schools

Asher Lehrer-Small — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 19:06:23 +0000

It’s a tricky moment in the pandemic for parents.

Mere weeks ago — though it may feel like a lifetime — K-12 operations seemed to be moving toward something of a pandemic equilibrium. Studies had confirmed that COVID than the surrounding community, children as young as 5 had gained access to vaccinations and, according to the White House, of schools were open for in-person learning.

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Then came the Omicron variant, sweeping over the country like a tsunami and plunging nearly all aspects of everyday life back into deep uncertainty.

In the weeks since, daily reported COVID cases in the U.S. have exploded, . More children are being with the virus than ever before. And positivity rates among school communities have reached levels that were previously unheard of: in Chicago, in Yonkers, in Detroit.

While most districts reopened as planned after the holidays, nearly closed their buildings for all or part of the first week of January, according to the data service Burbio.

Even where classrooms did reopen, many parents chose not to return their children. In New York City, for example, nearly a third of students did not show up on the first day back from break and on Friday when parents were also dealing with a morning snowfall, attendance plummeted to

The unprecedented case numbers usher in a “new math,” in the words of Harvard University infectious disease specialist Jacob Lemieux, for understanding and navigating life as the variant circulates.

“It’s likely that Omicron COVID is going to be so ubiquitous that every child will be exposed repeatedly at school and elsewhere,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told ��Ӱ��.

For many parents, that may be an unnerving reality.

The questions swirl: Do vaccines work against Omicron? How much protection does my child get from a cloth mask? What about an N95? What should I do if my kid tests positive?

The risk calculus can quickly become overwhelming.

Amid the widespread anxiety, and as pandemic fatigue continues to creep, ��Ӱ�� spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus during this latest stage — with many of their takeaways offering reassurance.

Experts also weighed in on hot topics like what masks to wear in school, how to handle positive cases and the recent, controversial move from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to cut its recommended quarantine time for infected individuals from 10 to five days.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 Are schools safe for children right now?

Yes, under the right circumstances, doctors agreed.

“I think for school districts that have a high vaccination rate, I think for school districts that have mandated indoor masking and I think for school districts that have appropriate ventilation and distancing … they’re going to be OK,” Philip Chan, medical director for the Rhode Island Department of Health, told ��Ӱ��.

Numerous academic studies underscore that when schools employ multiple mitigation strategies together — like masks, distancing and ventilation — transmission of the virus happens less frequently in classrooms than in the surrounding community.

“Teachers and students are far more likely to be infected at social gatherings, restaurants, etc. than at school,” George Washington University Professor of Public Health Leana Wen wrote on .

Even as thousands of schools across the country announced closures in the early days of the new year, President Biden implored K-12 leaders to continue in-person learning.

“The president couldn’t be clearer: Schools in this country should remain open,” said White House advisor Jeff Zients during a Jan. 5 press briefing.

Health experts say classrooms are safe, even amid Omicron, as long as schools double down on mitigation measures like masking and ventilation. (Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

But school leaders are running into a roadblock: not enough staff due to high shares of K-12 workers testing positive for the virus. Where COVID spread is especially rampant, it may be the right call to take a brief pause on in-person learning, said Kristina Deeter, a physician at Renown Children’s Hospital in Reno, Nevada. Teachers, she added, should not be coming into school if they’re sick.

In Chan’s Rhode Island, the majority of schools are open, though a handful had to close due to positive cases. The father of a 10-year old and a 14-year old, Chan said he felt confident sending his children back to their public school classrooms after the winter break. Both are fully vaccinated and wear surgical masks inside the building.

“I’m reassured that they’re protected, even against the Omicron variant,” he said.

2 Do vaccines work against Omicron?

The unanimous response from health professionals came in the form of a three-letter word: Y-E-S!

(Doctors, often technical and somewhat restrained in their email responses, answered this question using more exclamation than any other.)

Omicron has caused more breakthrough infections than other strains, they acknowledged, but emphasized that the immunizations have overwhelmingly succeeded at their key functions.

“The vaccines are still doing what they are intended to do: preventing severe infection and death,” said Peyton Thompson, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

“Deaths are declining despite the rapid rise in cases, thanks to vaccination,” she added.

And while it remains possible to catch the virus if you have received two, or even three shots, each dose of the vaccine provides an added layer of protection. Such cases tend to be mild, explained Wurtz.

“Breakthrough infections are almost always asymptomatic or trivial. Occasionally flu-like. So, yes, we can count on our vaccinations to keep us from getting really sick,” the Minnesota professor wrote in an email to ��Ӱ��.

Seven-year-old Milan Patel receives a COVID-19 vaccine at a school-based Chicago clinic in November. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Children under the age of 5 are not yet eligible for shots, and are not expected to gain access until this spring at the earliest, Pfizer on Wednesday.

In the meantime, “the best way to protect kids under 5 is to vaccinate all of the people around them – their older siblings, other family members, day care providers [and] teachers,” said Wurtz.

3 Boosters for kids — yay or nay?

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday and, on Tuesday, the CDC recommended an extra shot for as young as 5, five months after the initial two-dose series.

Deeter recommends that those who are now eligible receive their third doses.

“Many of our vaccines are actually three-shot series,” she told ��Ӱ��, citing the Hepatitis B immunizations, for example.

“My message to teenagers is this: you got your first shot, you got your second shot, you’ve got to finish the series.”

4 Why are so many children being hospitalized with COVID?

The answer, doctors say, boils down to two factors: vaccination rates and community spread.

Nationwide, pediatric COVID and are at a pandemic high, the latter surging 66 percent in the last full week of December to an average of 378 daily admissions.

But at the same time, vaccination rates among young people remain much lower than adults. Less than a quarter of children ages 5 to 11 have received a single dose of the COVID vaccine, and just over half of adolescents ages 12 to 17 have been fully immunized, according to data published by the . By comparison, of U.S. adults have received both shots.

The overwhelming majority of hospitalized pediatric COVID patients are unvaccinated, . “This is tragic, as the vaccine could have kept these children out of the hospital,” said UNC-Chapel Hill’s Thompson.

And regardless of vaccination status, the ballooning pediatric hospitalization levels do not mean that the Omicron strain is more severe to kids than previous variants.

“In large part, this is a numbers game,” said Kanecia Zimmerman, a study lead on Duke University’s , which guides school leaders on how to navigate COVID policy.

Even though surging caseloads nationwide have meant that more children have tested positive for the virus in recent weeks, “the proportion of hospitalized children remains small among the number of infected children,” the pediatrician explained.

5 What kind of masks are “good enough?”

The extreme transmissibility of the Omicron variant has spurred , some in red states, to reinstate mandatory masking rules — and has also reignited debates over which face coverings are most effective at protecting against infection.

There’s no doubt that the N95 and KN95 models do a better job of filtering out viral particles from the air, doctors agreed. They have a layer of polypropylene, a type of plastic, that can . Compared to a cloth mask, they can extend the time it takes to transmit an infectious dose of COVID by over seven times. If both the infected and exposed individuals are wearing N95s or KN95s, compared to both wearing cloth masks, transmission can take up to 50 times longer.

That said, Chan admits that the N95 and KN95 masks can be uncomfortable, and some may find it harder to breathe while wearing them.

“With my kids, I send them to school with surgical masks,” he said, noting that he himself will slip on an N95 before walking into crammed indoor spaces like the grocery store.

A cloth mask, a surgical mask and a KN95 mask

But whether you opt for a simple surgical mask, or something beefier, here’s his bottom line: “The cloth masks just aren’t quite as good as other types of masks,” said the Rhode Island doctor.

6 How should my child’s school be testing students and staff for the virus?

In December, the CDC endorsed “test-to-stay” guidance that allows students and teachers who may have been exposed to the virus to take rapid tests and return to the classroom if their results are negative.

It’s a helpful approach, Duke’s Zimmerman believes. Through the Delta variant wave, 98 percent of people who were exposed to the virus were never ultimately infected, she said — meaning that without test-to-stay, the vast majority of quarantines are forced to miss class without ever having gotten sick.

But testing can be costly and a heavy logistical lift. Furthermore, COVID tests are in nationwide. To cut down on the total number of noses to swab, schools in her state of North Carolina target resources to lunchtime exposures, where children drop their masks, she explained, eliminating the possibility of quarantine among less-likely cases where both students are masked.

Also important, according to Zimmerman: testing location. If students need to travel to an off-site area to receive their tests, it can exclude youth without access to transportation from participating in the program, forcing them to miss class for quarantine and creating further setbacks for the students already most affected by the pandemic.

“Offering testing at individual schools (not centralized locations) is critical for [the] success of this program because it is more likely to provide equal opportunity to all eligible staff and students within the district,” said the Duke pediatrician.

7 How should I navigate quarantine if my child or I test positive?

In late December the CDC reduced its quarantine guidelines for those who test positive for the virus from 10 days to five, a move that divided many in the medical community.

The takeaway, according to the doctors we spoke to? “Yes, returning to school or work five days after a known infection when someone is no longer symptomatic is fine,” said Wurtz.

Emphasis, they noted, is on no longer being symptomatic. Many individuals will continue having symptoms well beyond the five-day quarantine recommendation. If that’s the case for you or your child, you should continue to isolate until symptoms subside, or test results come back negative, as you may continue to be infectious, doctors said.

“Come back symptom-free,” said Deeter.

8 How long will the Omicron surge last?

A bit of good news here.

Though epidemiologists don’t know for sure how long the Omicron surge will last in the U.S., cases have in South Africa, where the variant was first identified in late November. Some believe the peak in many American communities will arrive of January.

“In most countries that saw Omicron, it went up sharply, which is happening now in the U.S., and it came down sharply,” said Chan. “There should be a steep decrease in the near future for us.”