AI Performance Task
Grade 8Instructions
This is a task designed to measure how you interact with AI to develop your ideas when reading and writing. For this task, you will:
- read a short, non-fiction passage
- respond to a prompt about that passage
- leverage AI to help you further develop your thinking
- revise your initial response
- reflect on your interaction with AI
You will have 20 minutes to complete the task.
Step 1
Read the Passage
One Person Said No
In February 1942, two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes along the West Coast. Most were American citizens. They were given days to leave, told to take only what they could carry, and sent to internment camps in remote parts of the country — among them Manzanar in the California desert and Heart Mountain in the Wyoming wilderness — where they would remain for years. The government justified the order as a military necessity, arguing that Japanese Americans living near the coast could not be distinguished from those who might act as spies. Almost no one in a position of power publicly disagreed.
Fred Korematsu did. A 23-year-old welder from Oakland, California, Korematsu was a U.S.-born citizen who refused to comply with the removal order. He altered his identity documents and attempted to continue living his life. When he was arrested, he chose to fight his conviction in court rather than accept it quietly, arguing the government had violated his constitutional rights. His case reached the Supreme Court in 1944. The Court ruled against him six to three. Justice Robert Jackson, one of the three dissenters, wrote that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." Korematsu carried the weight of that conviction for decades.
The story did not end there. In 1983, a law professor named Peter Irons discovered that government lawyers had deliberately buried a report from the Army's own intelligence division — a report concluding that Japanese Americans posed no real military threat. A federal court vacated Korematsu's conviction that year. In 1988, the U.S. government formally apologized to internment survivors and paid reparations. Korematsu spent the rest of his life speaking in schools and courtrooms, warning that what happened to Japanese Americans could happen again to any group if people stayed silent.