Making this on a throwaway account—now I consider myself a pretty moral person all things said and done. I don't use AI to write my assignments, I take pride in doing them myself. But this professor has been up my back all semester (metaphorically speaking) because he requires us to work in MS Word. Now I have a Mac which could theoretically run Word, but in practice it is about 10 OSs behind ;-; ok so I'm not a tech person. I'd never run into a teacher who made me use Word before and I'd never used it, so I had to send the .docx to my friends, parents, etc. thusfar in the semester and edited it using their computers so it was in the proper format, exactly two pages (my teacher is a stickler for this). I told my teacher I updated my computer so it could run Word because it seemed easier than the alternative—I figured, just three assignments at most.
Well I made a mistake yesterday in sending my final to my mom, who's a college professor (maybe this is why she freaks out ), asking not if she could edit it, but just take a look to make sure it doesn't look weirdly formatted because my Mac won't show me the file as it actually looks (turns out MS desktop version is trash). She freaked out, thought I cheated and that my college career would be over for downloading this file. Then my dad got involved, started chewing me out, said I was heading for prison unironically, and my mom started crying hysterically. I said calm down, they didn't have a reason to check my email history unless they thought I had made a violation and there was no reason for that, but they wouldn't listen, and my dad kept asking me to "listen for once in my life," because I always fight back when he tries to lecture me.
Then when they realized they had been treating me like a criminal who violated a great law of the universe... on speaker phone... in a public place... sometimes it makes me feel better to have strangers listen to the way my dad especially acts like I'm a wayward child because it makes me realize the craziness of it all. I don't think anyone's gonna report me, a stranger, over an unknown situation they aren't involved in. He said we are in a "surveillance state" and never to put him on speakerphone. I said ok and left him on speakerphone. Then my parents said they were going to cut me off, or "give me an ultimatum"—like I said, I just wanted them to verify the file was formatted correctly. I know it technically goes against the rules, but I've never been a stickler for rules if I think I'm following the spirit of the general assignment. They don't like that I pirate anime either, but here we are :/
So they said they wouldn't support me anymore and that I was on my own from now on—I'll graduate from my master's next semester anyway and get a job, and honestly, I've been wanting financial independence from their craziness my entire life, but I was naive. I should have known better to contact them about this, I know. They immediately regretted it and called me again to say they were buying me a new computer, but how am I supposed to react to this? Then they continued guilt tripping me, saying they've worked so hard for me to go to school. Meanwhile I'm here doing a major I don't even particularly like while they push me towards government jobs I know I wouldn't be suited for and scold me for being rude when I finally lose my temper and say I'm not interested, I could do anything I want. I hate the way they've always tried to push my life in a particular direction. I graduate within the top 3% of GPAs from an Ivy League school and I've never had someone else do an assignment/test for me or used ChatGPT to write my stuff while I watched several of my peers do real things wrong only to be told I'm heading for prison? How am I supposed to react to this? How the hell do I get out of this? I didn't really say anything crazy to them, but maybe my refusal to admit I made a 'terrible mistake' was an overreaction, idk.