Slashdot Mirror
Student Faces Expulsion for Facebook Study Group
Pickens brings news that a student at Ryerson University is facing 147 counts of academic misconduct after helping to run a chemistry study group through Facebook. School officials have declined to comment, but students are claiming that it is simply a valid studying technique in the information age. Quoting:
"Avenir, 18, faces an expulsion hearing Tuesday before the engineering faculty appeals committee. If he loses that appeal, he can take his case to the university's senate. The incident has sent shock waves through student ranks, says Kim Neale, 26, the student union's advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing. 'That's the worst part; it's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this - and my prof sees this, am I cheating?' said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself."
Yes. It is cheating. No one ever gets help from anyone in the real world, and certainly not when science is involved.
Is there any school level science problem for which the solution can't be found via judicious use of Google?
if these assignments are to be graded and the grade on the assignment will go as part of the assessment of the student, then yes this is cheating. On the flip side, if the sole purpose of homework is to learn, and credit is given based on the completion of an assignment, then no this is not "cheating" as the purpose is exercise. If you didn't get the answer correct, it was not going to count against you, and if you go to a forum, then all you have done is speed up the process (you don't have to wait until lecture). So if your homework is not a "take home open book quiz" then I can not see this as cheating. 10% of a grade can be huge depending on the mean test score and grading curve. Keep in mind I didhn't read the article (just skimmed it), so I don't know how it applies here.
When all else fails, try.
I think the difference to a normal group is that an informal discussion in a group is more the ideas behind the topics, you can't just 'copy & paste' other peoples words. Depending of the set up of the group, lazy students could not be members, but plagiarise other students work. Couple that with the fact there are 146 members, which is much larger then any 'real' group might be, and I can see why they might have a problem. Having said that, expulsion & other measures seem overkill, a review of policy and discussion with students would make much more sense.
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I think the method in my madness is a mad method
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That's all there is too it. They weren't talking about Chemistry in general, but they were answering questions and sharing the answers on an assignment worth 10% of their final grade. It was against the school's rules (Which they accepted when they joined the school) and they broke them, Facebook or no Facebook.
I don't quite understand why the media goes into a frenzy every time Facebook or YouTube is mentioned. Kids at my old highschool swapped answers on a free forum they quickly registered and ended up getting caught and punished. Is this any different? No, yet the media and non-techie readers get into a frenzy every time social networking is mentioned.
This is slightly off topic but what the hell is with that info box in the article? "OTHER CASES: Expulsions for internet misuse". It implies that students were expelled simply because they accessed the internet or social networking websites. But that's not the case. They were expelled because the school either has the right to expel at their own discretion (eg. The gay guy who was expelled John Brown Christian College) or they broke other school rules such as harassing and physically abusing school officials. The fact that it happened on the internet is redundant, the outcome would have been the same if polaroid pictures of the incidents were found or if someone was dobbed in.
Sharing information like that is cheating. You will be receiving a letter from the Vice President for Student Affairs outlining charges of academic misconduct against you.
From TFA:
Ryerson's academic misconduct policy, which is being updated, defines it as "any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage"
Great, no more turning up for class then!
Expulsion might seem like overkill, but it is the punishment in cases of plagiarism and copying for an assessment. It's up the school's discretion whether or not to reprimand, suspend or expel. If they student wants to make an appeal he can do so with the Dean or the head of school.
However I don't know how far that will get him. As far as the school is concerned he collected and disseminated answers to an assignment to 146 people. If he had printed out answers and shared them around the school would probably expel him in that case. Plus, I'm not sure a discussion with students would make that big a difference. I don't know the specifics of that particular school but that mine (UNSW in Sydney, Australia) and at every other school I know, the rules (Specifically plagiarism and cheating) are explained quite in-depth at various occasions. Interviews, faculty welcomes, school welcomes and all throughout the lectures and tutorials. In addition the student has to read the rules and sign - confirming that they will abide by them. Assuming that the school in the story has a similar way of doing things (Most likely) and the student STILL broke them shows he's a bit of an idiot and deserves it.
who cares? if the students are using this service with the intention of cheating then, they are not really learning anything.. furthermore they will have to cheat during the test as well, so why not wait and "catch them red handed? rather than make a big stink about something that could be legitimate. personally i'm glad people are using this and other means to obtain information. imho the public school system isn't worth much and hasn't been for some time now, sadly universities, and colleges are following the same trend. if the school you tend public or private doesn't teach you in a productive manner, i feel you are left with no other choice (that is unless you don't care about learning) than to find other means of furthering your knowledge.
-chris antixogh@gmail.com
Is it any co-incidence that the guy's name means 'the future' in French?
-1 not first post
chemistry (or other subject) get together at the local pub for a few pints of beer and frank discussion on the subject at hand eh?
Learning
University
Students
Assocation
of
America
called. They want their royaltie$.
Oh, and btw - Don't contact LUSAA for learning, that's not why they're there....
Their homework questions were worth 10% of their grade. Which seems bizarre. Wouldn't something like chemistry usually be 20% midterm, 30% labs, 50% final? I never had assigned homework problems marked after high school... the closest would be essays for English courses, term projects, and lab reports.
As always, everybody has to learn in some way or another. The real question is not whether the internet is a valid medium for discussion (it shouldn't matter), but whether these groups actually teach and guide or just give answers which helps nobody in the long run.
Nothing to see here.
Who cares how someone obtains knowledge, by studying by themselves or through rapid interaction with his peers? What matters is whether he learned something or not.
I don't care about homework and exercises, someone who cheats will flunk their exams aswell and if he won't, then who cares whether he did the exercises properly or not because apparently he understands the subject!
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I'm sure there's a lot we don't know about the story. But if there's 146 people in this "study group" then why is one person being targeted? Under most universities rules, if I had given you answers to an assignment, you would be just as guilty of cheating as I would. Simply organizing the group doesn't seem enough to single him out, as every one else still had to subscribe to the group. I agree thought, regardless, this _should_ come down to policy review and discussion.
Students learning new collaboration techniques is an adaptive strategy to cope with the need to understand new information Instead of using the Internet to download or buy a solutions manual (they exist - there are enough poor grad students), the students here were studying and collaborating on problems.
Now, how's this different from a face-to-face study session? The most obvious way is that there are potentially "leechers" in this situation who benefit from the exchange without contributing anything of value in exchange. Now, we've probably all met that person in the "real" study session who takes without giving, but they're seldom invited to the next session. In this online example, there are potentially many more leeches than not.
I would like to point out, however, that the students will have a very hard time understanding the material if they never manage to get the right answers on their problem sets. In that respect, it's very much like real life. As an Engineer, I collaborate endlessly about many problems. I use face-to-face contact, telephone, email, and most prominently - instant messenger.
Technology is not the problem here, but rather the way in which it was used. A facebook study group makes perfect sense, but if the solutions to each problem are posted there, it simply becomes a cheating tool for those too lazy to do their own work. If the group were small - 3-5, and the method of interaction required participation from each member, this would probably not be an issue.
Once again, people have to be hit over the head with a stick to understand the value of anonymity.
You're so eager to have your own "webpage" because you think you need to share every intimate detail of your life for the world to see that you forget that you need to just be quiet about what you're doing sometime.
Idiots.
Why so many? Is it so there is almost no chance the student can get away with them all?
Universities should use waterboarding. Not only would the exams be over quickly, and favor those who know the subject, but it would encourage only the most motivated student to apply.
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
I consider this pretty much a perfect system for CS, where there are a lot of frustrating non-academic problems to deal with.
Training students to be rugged individuals is the wrong thing to do. Give them homework that HAS to be done in a group.
In my engineering school, they believe this very strongly and in virtually all in-major classes homework is REQUIRED to be done in groups.
I hate it.
I already have dozens of engineering books picked up from used bookstores all over the state in my home, I know how to Google, and I've got friends I can ask the random question to. I'm also married and don't really like losing odd evenings and weekends to on-campus meetings with folks who can usually just stroll over from their dorm rooms and some of whom just wait on me to produce "the answer". Finally, many of these students are from all over the world and apparently it's quite acceptable in their cultures to do absolutely EVERYTHING together, including xerox their answers before handing them in.
Only one of my classes had a compromise: group work was OK but not required. I enjoyed that one.
If 10% of the marks can be gained in unsupervised work then some will seek help - this he deems cheating. To not expect some students to do this shows little insight into human behaviour.
There have been recent rumblings in the UK of exam-counting homework where parents have helped their kids to produce work that was above what the kid could have done themselves. Is this really a fair way of conducting exams ? If the students really learn through the help then there is nothing wrong, but if they do not then they achieve grades that they do not deserve.
What is needed is a proper evauation of teaching and grading methods. Perhaps each bit of course work should be followed by a viva that would let the professor learn if the student really understood what they had written, that however is probably more work than the professor is willing to do.
I see this as another crack-at-the-seams. Why should students be held to a standard that their "betters" cannot be bothered to follow?
... so if the books are used over and over, the "education" is used over and over... so why are prices rising high and higher?
On another tack
Elsewhere on today's Slashdot news:
National "Dragnet" Connecting at State, Local Level
Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 07, @02:11AM
from the story-you-are-about-to-hear-is-true dept.
Squirtle tips us to a Washington Post story about the progress and expansion of N-DEx - the National Data Exchange. Developed by Raytheon for a mere $85 million, N-DEx is hailed as a unified intelligence sharing system, which will allow agencies to share and analyze data from all levels of law enforcement.
- - -
FBI Admits More Privacy Violations
Posted by Soulskill on Thursday March 06, @06:59PM
from the truth-will-out-eventually-if-they-feel-like-it dept.
Privacy
kwietman writes "The FBI admitted that in 2006, for the fourth straight year, they improperly accessed phone and internet records of U.S. citizens.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Feeling superior towards other classmates does not make up for the education you missed by not cooperating with your peers. Humans are social beings, and the best learning happens in a social context. You learn a lot from seeing others make and correct mistakes. Yes there will be others(or you) that are only asking for fishes, not wanting to fish by themselves. You could help yourself more by explaining how to fish, than to walk away. They might give you a fish later when you are hungry.
Don't believe in social learning? try this for a thought experiment: Each one of you has to open a puzzle box of some sort (with a ticket for free sex in it if you prefer). Seeing someone else open that box will give you a clue how to open yours, and that will make the task easier that having to figure it out all by yourself.
As for the punishing prof: he needs to be sued for academic misconduct in denying his students an efficient study method, and for relying on security by obscurity. Perhaps his actual intent to teach was that the rules have to be obeyed no matter what, and you better not cross anyone that has any (percieved) power over you, as they have to right to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Hierachy has to be maintained after all. That would not suprise me in the corporatist USA.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I still have a vague recollection of the analog signal processing homework problem sets we had to do. And we sure as hell did them in groups. They sucked. You needed a group just to face the horror of Fourier transforms. If I still even remember how to spell Fourier right.
The real problem here is that the policy sucks. It's like college classes with an attendance policy - if students are not showing up, and attending the class is worthwhile, they're either brilliant and will pass the exams anyway, or they are not brilliant, and will fail the exams because they did not avail themselves of the opportunities presented by class. In those circumstances, an attendance policy is not necessary. So when a class HAS an attendance policy anyway, then you know that attending class is probably a waste of your time, because if it wasn't, the professor wouldn't need to hold your grade hostage to get you to show up and listen to them drivel 3 hours a week.
Same goes with homework. If people want to copy each other's homework, who cares - they'll fail the exam anyway. And if they copy homework and don't fail the exam, then the problem is that the homework was a waste of their time, and you shouldn't be blaming the students for not wanting to waste their time, especially when they're paying for an education, not the assignment of useless busy work.
paintball
Is there a link so we can see what this discussion is about?
What was the student's question?
What was the reply?
Were cheatin allegations precedented by other events?
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
Having been through two degrees in engineering, I can tell you that assignments can be hell if you don't understand the "trick" or the specific approach to solving the problem. It's not always intuitive as to how this happens. For example, when one is solving a polynomial derivative by first principles, isolating terms in the denominator by multiplying by "one" (where "one" is actually a polynomial expression divided by itself) is not intuitively obvious. When you do see it, however, you say "Ahhh, THAT'S how you do it!" and you can keep going.
And that's the crux of why you want to collaborate. Problems aren't entirely obvious to solve and involve subtleties outside of the context which most students would typically approach. It frustrated me personally to no end to have this type of nonsense foisted on me over and over again, particularly as these subtleties get more and more obscure. In my electromagnetics class, which is mostly vector calculus anyway, I happened to get it but lots of my friends didn't, and I helped them learn the tricks. Similarly, in my complex variable calculus class, I struggled with a bad prof while friends in another section would be able to help me out because their prof constantly gave them an "approach methodology". I dropped out of my RF electronics class because the prof from old Mother Russia was a known hard-ass who eventually was formally reprimanded and endangered his own tenure for failing almost half of a section of Electronics I. None of them would've had a hope in passing without collaboration.
Ultimately, when I taught a 100-person section of an electronics lab and marked assignments and lab reports, I made sure that the students knew what was going on. As long as they weren't ad-verbatim copies, I let it go. Even scribing solutions can help you do well if you understand the workings of the problem as opposed to blind copying. But I warned all of my students on the ultimate lesson I learned in the whole situation: whether or not you copy an assignment, you will be dead in the water come exam time or in your career if you don't fundamentally understand the basics of the material. And that's the ultimate lesson in school, the reason why your profs don't chase you down like they do in grade school and the reason that people who copy without learning almost always get weeded out during exam time, and the reason why assignments are only 10% of the grade!
The only question here is whether this student is really guilty of 147 counts of academic misconduct, as opposed to the other 147-some individuals. Why aren't they in here too? I'd have serious legal questions regarding the equal application of regulations and wouldn't be surprised if this ends up in a real court. The university regulation itself is insanely vague, and my experience with discipline officers is that they are very rigid and determined to justify their position by being hard-asses. These people are hardly administering justice; they're just out to screw one kids entire academic career because it was more systematically organized than the undercurrent that's been doing the same thing for years.
One last thing, boys and girls: make sure when you collaborate that you don't use any personally-identifiable information in your group. Use anonymous networks like Tor to access sites, and don't use your own name. That way, all the court orders in the world won't help these academic clowns with fangs sharpen them on your carcass.
My best classes were the ones that had tests that actually tested your knowledge, instead of just how much you could read the night before. Open-book tests, teachers that handed you to the list of questions 2 days before the exam... These were awesome. You -knew- the test would so much harder because of it, and the same general grades came out in the end. More teachers should care about having students learn instead of preventing them from 'cheating' on the test. Make the tests right and they -can't- cheat except by looking at someone else's exam during the test.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
There's a guy who was put 3 years in jail for creating a Facebook profile.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7258950.stm http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=545 http://helpfouad.com/
Res publica non dominetur
Long ago I had a friend who was enrolled in the unusual double major of pure and applied math. As a result of this, he ended up taking more or less the same course in differential equations twice, once on the pure side, once on the applied side.
One of the two professors was rather lazy, so at some point during the course he ended up being given the same assignment he had already completed the first time around: twenty pages of dense pencil-work for which he had received a grade of 95% We're talking a major math school that often beats MIT/Harvard at the Putnam. This was not a trivial accomplishment.
One night, I want to go out for beers or something, but he tells me "I can't". I go "Why not?" "I have to copy out my twenty page diffy-Q assignement." I go "What do you mean, you have to copy out your own assignment?" He tells me the situation. I suggest "Why don't you just cross off the professor from the first time around and put the name of the new professor there, you already got 95% and it was your own work".
Obviously, he wanted to go for beers, because he took my foolish advice. His prof (a woman, let's call her Dolores) gave him a ZERO for his efforts. A ZERO for handing his own work (again), when she herself was too lazy to come up with her own assignment. He had to protest, and got his grade back, but it involved a lot of stress. Dolores seemed like a normal enough person in real life, if a bit stressed most of the time.
These days, if you write up your assignment using one of the math software packages, you could simply reprint your own work, and the prof. would have nothing to complain about. Dolores must have thought it was an insult to her authority, that he wouldn't have been so glib with a male professor. Or something. It actually beats me she was thinking at all. It's not like he had 70% the first time and clear scope for improvement, either. His first pass had two points deducted for what amounted to transcription errors, the kinds of small mistakes any person with a brain worth having will make in the middle of twenty pages of dense pencil-work.
This ban on "collaboration" in completing homework assignments has never been real. Students actually learn better when they share the process. I find the best situation is where the assignment is too difficult for any one person independently, and students are forced to group together and learn from each other.
"The Paper Chase" is effectively a documentary on this schooling approach. At the end of the day, though, you need to write up the answers in your own words or you'll be screwed on exam day, whatever credit you got on the assignments in the meantime.
It does sound like this site crossed the line more than most approaches to shared learning. But I wouldn't be too quick to side with the institution either, as universities can often be remarkably dumb institutions.
Some people say this prepares you for real life. There's the problem. It prepares you to *accept* the crap that goes on far too easily, so instead of having fewer PHBs we end up with more. I miss the days when universities existed to aim high.
I think the college is fully justified in kicking this guy out. When I was in college, the point was that I myself solve those differential equations problem. If I had somebody else figure it out for me, then I missed the point of the class. Too many students these days think the point of college is getting your homework done. It's not! The point is to DEVELOP YOUR MIND! Part of that occurs when you yourself figure out the various approaches to a problem and work out the answer entirely for yourself. What does this student think is going to happen in the business world? You don't go asking a committee to dream up new innovations--you do it yourself. And if you have failed to develop those critical thinking skills in college, where the fuck are you going to develop them? No, this is just another example of a LAZY STUDENT trying to get help so he can get his assignment done. I remember in college that I would work alone and then I discover that some of the other "A" students worked as a team. So, how f'n fair is that? But now, years later, I'm sure those people have stagnated in their careers while I have flown pretty high--because I can think on my feet.
(At least in the schools I've been in, and at the risk of the "True Scotsman" fallacy, any school with common sense:)
An exam tests your ability to solve problems under controlled conditions, without outside assistance. Homework is an exercise, and even if your grade depends on the homework, what is graded is essentially effort and diligence (like grading attendance). If you are assigned homework that requires you not to research or ask for assistance, why the hell did the teacher not make this a test, so the terminology remains clear? Isn't that like prohibiting people from sharing lecture notes, since getting information from a lecture you didn't attend would be "cheating"?
Seriously, does anyone not research online for homework, even if they do recall the subject matter, simply to verify that they understood it? And compare their homework with other students to check for errors? Obviously, copying homework is stupid as you fail to learn anything, but discussing and explaining homework problems is not copying; it is education. That other little thing schools are supposed to do, besides their main purpose of evaluating performance.
I know so many people who have talked about their work with their co-workers, especially when they needed help with something, and rather than being thankful, they've been fired.
It's so true. Collaborate and wither.
...who makes examinations incapable of determining real learning as opposed to mere regurgitation of the homework. This is probably doubly so for professors who crib their exams from the textbook materials. This likely isn't an issue of academic integrity amongst students.
My school, on the other hand, provides resources for this exact type of collaboration. The fact that some schools encourage this, but others view it as cheating is something to consider.
Bork Bork Bork!!
One of our professor used to allow students to carry their textbooks to their exams (which were conducted in a sparsely seated large hall so that nobody could actually talk to each other.
So yes in the exam we couldn't share information for solving the problems but we could use the books. So that kind of cheating (taking small pieces of paper) was completely irrelevant. It required setting questions that tested knowledge rather than memory.
It takes a lot more effort to ask questions that cannot be solved without a deep understanding.
Expecting people to not share in homework is stupid. Actually homework should be designed to promote learning, rather than testing. So it should be enforced that everybody did their homework, but it should not be graded.
I have all requisite degrees in the hard sciences (BS, MA, PhD)--all earned the hard way at some of the world's top universities by hard study and work. And I'll go toe-to-toe in publication record (quality+quantity, especially quality) with just about any one out there. But I think modern professors do not teach with students' learning in mind. It seems that the idea these days is to make it as hard on students as possible. I think this student's problems and the active discouraging of study groups does a huge disservice to education (we are defining education as the teaching of academic knowledge).
Professors, this note is for you: the goal is to get academic knowledge into the brain of your students--not to teach life's tough lessons. Let life do that and stop being so full of yourselves. If you want to make sure they are learning what you should be teaching them, give them tests. If they fail, re-evaluate how you teach. Your job is not to be a moralist, moralizer, philosopher (obvious exceptions noted), parent, policeman, or judge.
Again: knowledge => student brain. Focus on that.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Homework assignments are nearly always bullshit. If somebody did not understand what he was taught, a traditional homework assignment will not help him much. And if he did understand it, the assignment is a waste of time that will only de-motivate the intelligent students by forcing them to do the same boring stuff all over again.
A study group where answers are exchanged and explained is actually one of the few ways how a homework task can be constructive for those students who are still interested to learn something: other students are taking there the part of what the teacher should have done in the first place: make the students understand the problem and even those who only ask questions will at least have to formulate their questions in an understandable way.
To formulate it differently: a homework task is ONLY of any value to the students, if they can do whatever research and asking around they need. The task of a homework should not be to examine and test the students, but to give them the opportunity to *use* what they have learned in an interesting and insight-providing way.
I am often shocked to learn what anachronistic and counter-prodcutive views teachers do show in cases like this one.
The problem with this "group" versus other study groups is that anyone seeking just the answer to any assignment would be able to surf right past the learning and directly to the answer, that's what makes it cheating.
stuff |
Have any of you ever been to college? The academic integrity polices are pretty strict. There's a huge difference between a study group of 5 people and a study group of 150 people. Just imagine organizing a study group of 150 students at the library and see if anyone notices. In fact, some courses ban study groups of even 5 people, saying you have a question about homework you have to ask the professor or TA.
It's not about finding the answer online, if it was a test in searching the web for every answer, everyone would get an A. The system's not broken, student's are often told they cannot discuss homework questions with other students. What's broken is the integrity and honesty of university students.
Couldn't he have avoided all this trouble by simply using a pseudonym on-line?
one for 'them' that is public and all that. put nothing bad or sensitive or anything there. its like a decoy for the first layer of truecrypt (as a non-car analogy, for a change!).
the PRIVATE website you create and use (you can do one, you don't need gawdy flashy and crappy FB/MS hosting!) - that would be the one where you can feel free to get wild, all you want. each person who you give access to would have a software key to get in.
you guys really need this duality. please start it on before 'your space' becomes 'useless space' (if it hasn't gotton that way, already).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I was a chemistry undergrad and nearly every chemistry professor expected and encouraged us to work in groups. Homework usually counted simply as credit. If you attempted to do the homework, you got 10 points or so. In organic, homework was 10% of of grade and it was graded for accuracy. We were still encouraged to work in groups.
To the poster above me who said all homework is bullshit. In organic, we had homework that would take a week to do with at least an hour a day of work. It did help you learn the material and I probably wouldn't have been able to pass the tests without it. In some classes, there simply is not enough time to fully learn the material in the 3 hrs provided/week + lab and having to work on test-type problems does help. All my organic tests and homework were written by my professor and aside from general ideas, google is of no use.
Maybe it was just the culture of my school. The chem department was very laid back and only had 6 full-time Ph.D's (my univ doesn't use TA's).
Gone!
If it is truly a study group then all information that can be attained for preparing for an exam is an available resource. I don't feel it is cheating. It's up to the professor to prepare exams that determine if the student understands the knowledge. If gathering & building knowledge from different venues is grounds for expulsion... then does this school consider performance of mathematics calculations such as 3 + 3 = 6 to be plagerism if not accredited to the first person that performed the calculation?????
This 'University' was granted its charter very recently, and is known primarily for it's vocational programs. This looks to me like the school is trying to prove themselves worthy of a reputation higher than that of a community college, which is exactly what they were until recently. Information wants to be free. If not Facebook, it will be something else... From actual study halls, to early BBS, to Usenet, IRC, search engines and now social networking, this sort of thing has always been done. Remember that there still must be skill (and sometimes much more work) in distinguishing the right answer from dozens of wrong opinions. People differentiate Facebook from study groups because of the scale. Try to imagine discerning the correct information from the cacophony of speculation in an online forum. You have to prove out the answer you are giving before you hand it in as your own work, or you're taking your chances on someone else's potentially wrong answer. I say pull Ryerson's charter until they can figure oout how to operate in the information age.
Enforcing the concept of mandatory homework is pointless and wasteful for some. Homework is for people who require practice and repetition. Speaking from experience, I learn primarily through observation, and I'm a quick study. After paying attention at lectures and reading the study text, I could usually skip the repetitive task of homework, and still score 98% or better on a chapter test, and 95% on the semester final. For me, homework was counterproductive, and squandered time could be better spent on something else; work, downtime, sleep. I often resented the repeitive learners that tended to slow down the pace of the class.
This isn't the sig you're looking for... Move along.
It may be an issue of scale: it's easier for them to demonstrate his FULL complicity in all the 'cheating' by virtue of his admin status, whereas for each individual student they would have to document exactly what they contributed.
This may even be a test case: if they succeed against the admin, THEN they take the time to proceed against the individual members of the group.
"Stumble before you crawl"
QUIT applying to these schools! If schools like this are going to do things like this then students should go somewhere else. It's simple fact of the free market. If you don't like someones product go somewhere else. If enough students leave and/or quit applying to that school the tuition money starts to dry up. When that happens the school will eitehr change it's ways (possibly to late to save it) or go out of business. Simple.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I have found that at the college level, required homework results in a lot of people who learn very little but force their way through an assignment by any means they can, often not learning a thing. This results in a false grade that doesn't accurately reflect a person's abilities. The best kind of homework is optional homework, as it serves as guidelines to what you need to learn for testing and is as cheat proof as it gets.
Good thing I never went to Ryerson. If I ever need to transfer to a school in Toronto, they're way off my list now.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
In short, because people are stupid.
The longer version, because the media is not there to give you or anyone useful news. The "media" is here to see your attention to advertisers, and one way they do this is by pretending to give you useful news, and guess what? Most people are stupid enough to believe them. To maximize their advertising income, the "media" will use what headline that catches people's attention, right to the line that people will realize their trick and stop watching such "news".
So, back to the point, the media goes into a frenzy every time Facebook or YouTube is mentioned is because people, including you and me here, are stupid enough to took notice whenever Facebook or YouTube is mentioned.
Now, I want my time wasted on this non-news back...
Oliver.
Ok, I went to UofT when Ryerson was still a technical college, but what is with them?
- From what I hear, they have to push really hard in their engineering classes since they need to build their rep., which in the short/medium term is unfair to their students since they don't get the same reputable degree from say Waterloo.
- That whole Dragon's Den publicity crap ( http://canentrepreneur.blogspot.com/2006/11/hot-times-in-dragons-den-long-post-but.html )
- Now this.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
The university is in the wrong here, and dreadfully so. At my uni, most classes make use of "Blackboard" web apps, which include a discussion board which students make use of constantly on homework assignments. Requests to walk through a certain question or explain the answer in detail are perfectly normal, and sometimes the professor him or herself is the one to provide the needed information.
The Facebook "wall" is in essence no more than this type of discussion board. It simply provides another method for students to help each other study. Does this university's administration think that meatspace homework study groups don't work out the answers communally? Give me a break.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
I teach college physics, and I encourage my students to study together, talk through concepts and help each other learn. That said, they have to submit their own work for homework, and of course they will be the only one they can rely on for exams (which for me are closed book, no notes). I tell them the first day of class that it's not cheating if they talk to someone else about the concepts and ideas, but it's cheating if they just get the answers from someone else, or copy someone else's solution.
So posting on someone's Facebook wall, or any place else, the answer to a problem, or the solution, or even an outline of a solution, would be cheating. But discussing the concepts and ideas would not. It's not clear cut if using Facebook automatically constitutes cheating. But with a written record it would be much easier to decide than just hearing from someone that someone else copied someone else's homework.
What happens if someone does cheat this way? In my class they only hurt themselves. The homework problems are chosen to be worked, illustrative examples, or problems that lead to either direct insights or to questions which then lead to insights If you just copy from someone else you miss out on that, and you won't be able to do well on my exams.
It turns out my current sig is appropriate to this topic. The character limit didn't let me add the attribution. It's from Enrico Fermi.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats
Reading all these comments, you see two types of answers: people who did not do their own work and who are trying to justify their cheating by saying "everybody does it" or some other such crap. Then you see the people that I would hire, those who chose to do their own work and sweat bullets until they came up with the answer. And when you get out in the real world and work with both types, it's clearly obvious which type an individual was. The cheaters are like scared rabbits, asking at every turn for help, scurrying over to their fellow Indians, asking in Hindi how to do this. I worked next to one guy who spent at least two hours on the phone daily asking friends how to do his work. Whenever his boss came around he silently hung up and acted like he was working. Cheaters? You will never succeed. And if you do succeed in getting a job, it will be obvious from the crappy work products you have created. Independent workers? You will succeed in spades. You will know how to fend for yourself and that ability will help you each and every minute of the day, while the cheaters are flustered and freaking out, looking frantically for something, somewhere on Google, to copy. I wrote in a slashdot post weeks ago that I had been working four years on an AI problem. I get this personal reply from some guy using an anonymizer asking me to GIVE HIM FOUR YEARS OF SOURCE CODE. Then, finally, when I point out that no way in hell would I even think of giving it to him. So, I get a reply and the guy tells me his name is "Pete" and that he's from New Hampshire and that he's an old mainframer. Then, finally (fortunately, I never sent him anything), it comes out that "Pete" is actually Rajstennaj Barrabas and he's a lying sack of shit. He's not "Pete" and he's never been to New Hampshire. He just wanted to try to fool me into giving him my source. Yet another god-damned example of lying cheaters and their urgent desire to have somebody else do their work.
But thats how it works in the real world, rarely do you work on a project by yourself. Right now I'm working at an engineering firm and I have 5 coworkers all working on the same project as me, using ladder logic and drafting documentation. You have to learn to work in groups, from what it sounds like you're getting into the worst groups in the class unfortunately.
Complain to your peers and then the professors if you really feel people arn't doing their fair share. Bargain yourself to working by yourself, but I will attest that group work is almost always the way to go in all real world situations; you just can't think of everything yourself.
Posting with out proof reading since 2001.
Rule of law does not mean "laws we like". It just means that everybody knows what to expect, so we can stop worrying about cops and criminals and just go about our business--studying, making money, raising our families, whatever it is we do in life.
Whether the law is good or bad is a separate question, already being discussed here.
Selective application of any broad law is bad because people don't know what to expect.
Retribution against any particular behaviour is no longer determined by social contract (written or simply understood), but by the whims of the wealthy, the connected, or the mob.
So, here's the "law"--and the accused knew it:
While Neale admits the professor stipulated the online homework questions were to be done independently...
But, the application is not consistent--facebook is out, but physical meetings are in.
No mention in the article of any disciplinary action from attending meetings in "the dungeon".
"...the popular Ryerson basement study room engineering students dub The Dungeon..."; "...if we were having trouble, we'd post the question...Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon,"
University's solution? Make the law even more broad:
"...any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the integrity of the learning environment."
This will have the effect of encouraging a culture of secrecy and blurring the line between "cheating" and "collaboration".
As a tool to prepare students for "the real world", academic ethics policies often do more harm than good. This university fails to demonstrate to their students that rule of law can benefit society.
Instead, Ryerson validates their view that the law is arbitrary, the best thing is to do everything in secret, and that there is NO difference between cheating and collaboration.
Finally, Ryerson's recent update to their policy validates the view that government exists primarily for the purpose of preserving its own authority--not for the benefit of the governed.
The more hip and cynical /.ers may take perverse pleasure in seeing the last bold lines in print.
From a realistic and practical standpoint, though, I don't believe this is an attitude Ryerson or anybody else trusted with the indoctrination of young citizens should actively seek to promote.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Other methods also come to mind
The point is that the "rule" is so vague it can be applied to all methods of of legitimate study and should therefore be considered unenforceable due to its vagueness . I did RTFA and there is a statement that no solutions were "traded" just tips and pointers as to how to solve a problem. The fact that it is on Facebook as opposed to a study hall or anywhere else is irrelevant. What needs to be examined is what was exchanged, was it actually solutions, plagiarized works, advice on how to solve problems in general, study tips, whatever? As always, the devil is in the details and if you want an informed opinion you have to look at them
Even so it is a difficult judgement call since you can be having roadblock and have to post part or all of your solution to get help.
I.E. We know the answer is 4 but every time I add 2 + 2 I get 5, what am I doing wrong?
I also wonder about the "permanence" factor, if the problems all change every year then having "old" solutions available is a study method not a cheat. If the teacher is using the same stuff then they are lazy. The university I went to published the exams, with solutions, for several prior years as an aid to studying, it probably kept the profs honest as well. As far as I can see the decision point isn't what technology is used, its what information ( that's useful data ) was exchanged.
I have previously argued that the owner of a social networking page could post legal "terms of service" to prevent employers or prospective employers from viewing the page. http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2007/11/privacy-advocates-such-as-nyu-professor.html By the same token, a student might post legal terms of service that forbid a professor or college administrator from observing the content of the page. This idea is privacy by contract. It's not legal advice for anyone (or a substitute for counselling by a lawyer), just something to think about. --Ben
Benjamin Wright, Dallas, Texas, benjaminwright.us
Homework is a stupid concept, and I don't really understand why parents allow it. When the schoolday is over, kids should be allowed to play. That's what kids do. When I was in high school, I simply ignored the mindless homework I was given, and instead I spent my time learning computers, music, and various other subjects. Because of that I have a very respectable job in IT. If anything, homework should be elective - or maybe only required for AP/honors classes. But the majority of students need time to be kids.
Not trying to start a flamewar here - just being honest!
The first thing I thought of was the earlier story about US educators wringing their hands about why Finnish students did so much better. Perhaps in Finland it is understood that effective learning has a _huge_ social component, so they don't get all worked up when they see students collaborating. And yes, I understand that there's a difference between collaboration and having the local geek do all your math homework for you. The danger here seems to be that the educational system is wanting to tell students that "you can talk amongst yourselves, but only if you say things that we want you to say". Talk about the antithesis of a learning environment.
RFC2119
It comes with little surprise to me and is just one of the many reasons why I never went to university or any such institution.
The socratic and aristotlean concepts of college were built on the ideas of collaboration.
Somewhere along the lines, the catholics turned it into a monastic institution: a teacher sits at the front of the class and espouses the word of God. A one-way stream of information. One simply makes notes, writes the test, and goes out into the world to do more of the same.
It's sad that this became the standard for education today. Knowledge isn't gained by learning how to jump through hoops. It's learned in discussion and collaboration. Encouragement and inspiration were never found on the sheet of an exam.
Students inspired enough to start a study group together should be encouraged and led in the right directions by a sympathetic faculty of experienced teachers.
I completely agree with the original article in how there is no reason for him to be considered "cheating". How can you cheat at homework? If a group of people chose to get together and help each other with the homework (virtually or in-person, it's the same), who cares? What's wrong with that? I just don't get it.
Now, if there were some rules in this school about not conferring with your classmates on homework, I could understand that, but I did not read anything to that effect.
A few words from the point of view of a prof who has taught 800+ person freshman courses where these online discussion groups naturally develop (at one point, even hosted one the course website). Of course students will discuss homework, and generally it's to be encouraged. If students are all given near-identical assignments, then of course there will copying- this isn't to be encouraged since it's a poor learning strategy for the students. The question is how to discourage it? Verbal exhortation only goes so far. The best solution, imo, is to stop the cellulose-based practice of giving every student an identical set of problems- instead give them identical learning goals and pick practice problems from a huge sea of questions, based on individual performance. Academic dishonesty proceedings could be considered a valid means of discouraging rote copying- the problem is that many instructors at universities, (which are generally decentralized in that sense that each course is administered independently), have let the issue go unaddressed for a long time and allowed a culture of efficient en masse online copying to become established- if students don't see a behavior being punished, the natural assumption is that it's legitimate. Online discussions wherein students help one another understand the subject matter are great- unfortunately human nature being what it is, an online forum in a class with identical/uniform homework assignments naturally evolves into an answer mill, even more so than was the case with pre-internet study practices (although of course the same behavior occurred in the days of cellulose as well, just less efficiently and less overtly, so there was still a general sense that it was illicit).
Curtains for windows?
In my experience, you don't get much. Seems like you couldn't handle the course.
Blar.
When faculty (especially in the sciences) keep graduate students for years, prevent them from actually finishing by holding up their projects and dissertation, just because the grad student is working on research critical to the faculty person? And the faculty person uses / publishes the work of that student with little or no attribution or acknowledgment? And it's research that the faculty person isn't capable of doing any longer at this stage in his/her career? Oh, and worm, teach my classes as well. Oh, I've gotten off track. That's MENTORING. That's how people develop professionally. It's not an abuse of power or position. Or some form of academic dishonesty. Certainly not. Never. Ever.
Why is this an issue in the first place? It seems to me that this really brings a new view of education or getting a degree. Maybe this process should be re-thinked. Point one: So if I text my friend on a cell phone if he/she knows how to do/approach a problem, does that mean school now should get access to my phone. How far is this going to go? But this brings point two. What is the meaning of this anyway. It is obviously understood that the school doesn't want to give out the degrees to the WRONG people. That said, what would it hurt to give a degree to the WRONG people. What would the person do with a degree. Yes they can apply for a job, but the interview still holds, the technical questions still hold. And besides if you do good on the interview you still have 6 months prior to the review to do good. If an employee doesn't know the technology he probably wouldn't last those 6 months, again this depends on the employer right. This brings to another point. At a work place you learn much more than in school and with the years of experience being accumulated you will probably not have a problem finding a job. At this point does having a degree really matter. What value does it bring? Just my two cents.
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
If true, this is shocking. For the senior management of a university to attempt to ban student study groups is for them to demonstrate their fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of learning and scholarship.
The fundamental aim of a teaching university is to increase the students' understanding of their subject - nothing more. Of course, you need some form of assessment to determine whether or not a student's understanding has indeed improved, and in those assessments of course collaboration has to be seen as cheating and bad.
However, assessment is a highly unusual situation in academia. It is the only situation in which consulting references is bad, and the only situation in which collaboration is bad. In every other aspect of academic life collaboration is not just "not cheating" - it is essential. Just as academic staff need to collaborate on writing papers, undergraduates must/b> collaborate by working together in study groups outside formal lectures and tutorial sessions to jointly improve their grasp of the subject. Such teamwork is universally approved of everywhere from business to the military to academia - except here, apparently. For the university to take the viewpoint the article suggests is academically reprehensible. The fact that today students can collaborate on facebook (or wherever) whereas formerly they would have got together in one of the dorms is neither here nor there.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Homework and tests are two very different things - asking for help on a test = cheating. With homework though, you can look in the textbook, check wikipedia, etc. (where the answers are 'posted' as well, you could say) - that is the point of homework: to study the concepts and to prepare for an exam, which is the real test of your knowledge. I, and every student I know, don't hesitate - ever - to ask friends or instructors for help on homework if I need it. Facebook is just another medium for communication - I don't see why it should be any different from the spoken word.
Cheating is in the mind of the beholder.
It is difficult to learn something without seeing it done, and more information is always better.
If cheating is defined by "answering the question without having your mind go through the appropriate process first", no one except the student can truly answer that.
This school is freaking out at students for posting math online.
It's sickening how many of us categorize copying as a mean of academic collaboration.
It's not. Copying the answer is cheating, period.
However, I believe the course administrators did something wrong too to give too much weight to something that is so prone to copying.
IMHO homework should count for no more than 15% of the total course performance, and there should be rules that if you fail the final, you'll fail the course no matter how well you did the assignments.
While Neale admits the professor stipulated the online homework questions were to be done independently, she said it has long been a tradition for students to brainstorm homework in groups, particularly in heavy programs such as law, engineering and medicine.
Each student in the course received slightly different questions to prevent cheating, she said, and she did not see evidence of students doing complete solutions for each other. Instead, she said, they would brainstorm about techniques.
The instructions of the prof as stipulated by the accused student's advocate tell us that students were to accomplish their assignments independently. The professor went to lengths to provide different questions to enforce independent work. The students have shown that while working on that assignment they were seeking methods to answer their questions. I believe this falls under an academic dishonesty standard.
Of the degrees I have and am currently perusing, the professors have stipulated quite clearly how we were to accomplish our tasks. Based on those instructions my fellow students and I displayed different levels collaboration.
Examples:
Saddleback College CS 1B: I was grading assignments for a professor and found thress students using a case statement instead of a a multi-tiered If-Then structure. It wasn't wrong but decidedly different. One of the programs was unique, the other two shared comments. Sad. Prof. gave them half off knowing the exam would separate out those that could and those that could not. Cheaters end up harming themselves more than anyone else.
UCSD CSE 141B CPU Circuit Design: Our professor requested we work alone for our home work problems and make groups for our final CPU design. My two other roommates and myself worked very hard to do our own assignments within the scope of the instructions. Thirty percent of the class did not and received punishment for that.
MBA School:We were supposed to work in groups for our problem based curriculum. So we worked together.
Law School:We are not allowed to consult with anyone on our papers, not even our husbands or wives. So guess what? No one talks about their papers.
The accused did not work independently as instructed. The professor could have highlighted many different methods for collaborative work, he did not. Sorry Dude.
I study languages, which I accept, is not the same, but I would be absolutely stuffed I weren't allowed to work on the homework in groups. I do understand that learning languages does to some degree require speaking and listening skills though, which is why the group work is so useful to me. However, I also know that if I just copy the answers off someone, I've learned nothing, and whatever I write will not sink in.
I can't see that being any different for a science subject. When I used to study maths, sometimes, the best learning resource for me was the problem, and the answer, on the same page. This meant that I never got anything wrong, but if I didn't understand something, I knew about it (because I couldn't get the correct answer). If I weren't allowed to use the answers, I'd have got stuff wrong, but I wouldn't have known that I needed help understanding it until two weeks later once my work had been marked, by which time, we'd have moved on to something else, and I wouldn't have the time to revisit the topic I didn't understand until just before exams. If I don't bother learning the stuff, I expect to fail the exam, so if I copy work of somebody, it's only me that suffers. Sometimes though, it's nice to get verification that your answer is right, and that you understand the material properly.
Given the details in the story, the guy (and all the contributers) cheated, and they should all be read the riot act. Should they be expelled? I think anyone would have to hear the entire story from him first (IE: what the hearing should provide for him) before that is concluded.
The Professor stipulated that the students must work independently. Is that a reasonable expectation? Maybe/ maybe not. Is it the best possible application of a homework assignment to get the most out of class? Maybe/ maybe not.
BUT, just because a student disagrees with the professors methods, it does not give them the green light to cheat.
Why is the definition of cheating so broad, and the punishments vague? Well, technically copying "Hello, World" out of K&R for your first C program "might" constitute plagiarism if you don't reference it... but everyone is expected to just copy it. There is some latitude, and the university doesn't want a policy to tie their hands.
I think the likely nail is:
"If you request to join, please use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted."
Regardless of what was ACTUALLY discussed, this shows the intent.
Finally, I think students need to weigh in on the quality of teaching they get from professors. If a professor is truly substandard, the student should complain. Only when a track record of complaints against a tenured professor exists, can something get done. Just cheating your way though a class only makes it worse for the next student that comes along.
If it was instructions on HOW to solve sample questions from the assignments, with few or no actual answers given, then that is a legitimate study group tool. Help outweighs any harm.
If it was complete answers to all the questions, and most of the people "studying" there just used it to copy the data and turn it in as their own work, then it was a cheating tool. All harm and no help.
IMO, only 10%-15% of students can study independently, they're smart/hardworking. But the end result is, they understand the subject at the end by attending class, reading text book and doing the homework. For the rest of the students, 90%-85%, they don't understand the material totally. Only a few percent within that group actually want to honestly learn the technique by learning. The majority of the students, they just want to get by, by finishing the homework and get grade and pass the course. This is the different between a "learner" and a "student" in my definition. My definition of a "learner" is who would like to learn the technique understand it and apply it, regardless at the end if he/she get a good grade or not, but he/she retain the technique that they learn. My definition of a "student" is create by the grading system that the school created. They ("student") only cares about grade and passing the course. They will do anything to get grade and pass the course without really care about obtaining the technique or care about retaining the technique. So IMO, if a "learner" would use the collaboration technique to obtain knowledge, that is just to me. But if a "student" would use the collaboration technique to just pass the class or get good grade, that's not just. However, our society happens to need both type of people. People who love knowledge and become scientist or engineer. Or people just like to get things done... Both type of people need to pass the University and get a college degree.
I'm currently in my last semester of an electrical engineering degree, and in regards to homework, I have only been required to submit homework assignments for grading in 2 out of all of the courses of my degree; this means that, regardless of whether I'd worked the problems alone, or with 500 of my closest classmates, unless I learned from the experience, it wouldn't influence my grade. This model means students are forced to sink or swim on their own merits on exams, and keeps the homework where it belongs...out of the classroom. If the Prof. doesn't like students collaborating, they should simply keep homework out of the grading scheme, as this is ultimately better for the students and the institution.
Example: let's say that in one of my classes I go rambling on about some stupid nonsense, and it's full of holes, but I'm dealing with second years who are easily confused by a forceful presentation. So, in the classroom itself, they're all "Wow - that's really (x) and I think (y)" so, some of them get together and informally discuss over a few beers, "Yeah - Prof. Spoilsport's full of shit. Look - right here - everything he said yesterday was crap. Obviously, we're not getting what we think we're getting - let's form a study group."
Now, the verity of my lecture is of no consequence - I could have been barking mad, or stone cold sober mumbling truisms of such obviousness Jack Handey would consider it an eminent truth of the universe. That's not the point. The point is association of participants in an educational context that is additional and secondary to the classroom experience. If they go over homework questions all together in some filthy dorm room or in the digital space of facebook, I don't see the difference, except one is public and done in the glare of the internet, and the other is done in the dim light of bong hits and dingy carpet.
I also think this speaks to the differences in spatial perception by students who have grown up with digital materials and their professors and educational institutions. For failing to respect this difference is to fail to perceive the difference between boundary postulation and boundary location. These are social facts of enormous power, and it shows the power of the stranglehold of the cultural industries on the imaginations of the young, at the same time it shows the young taking advantage of cultural techne in order to advance themselves within the social order and confines of social institutions, such as Ryerson University.
To put it all more simply, these kids saw a way to share data, and did it. This is very much like a P2P system, only with knowledge as the commodity being traded, and it shows an essential fact missed by the Prussian system's axia and assumptions of and in education, especially education in the 21st century: that it is a social act committed by groups, that students are not blank slates, and that the traditional classroom system needs to be re-thought as the petroleum age comes to a shuddering skid into the brick wall of resource depletion. After the wreck, some few will survive the crash, and it is imperative that education be one of them. Otherwise, as Jane Jacobs described: we rush headlong into a Dark Age.
This kind of thing happening at Ryerson is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what is to follow all over the world, assuming the likes of China's so-called "Communist" party and the idiocy of American Fascism (like Bush/Cheney et al) don't shut the whole thing down before we get there. This expansion of education into ICT should be embraced and managed, co-opted and accounted for, not persecuted and fought with threats of expulsion. I think the kid at Ryerson (like Sean Fanning) should get a freakin' medal for his efforts.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I've been taking c++ classes lately. This sort of thing has been going on for almost a decade with those sort of classes. Now, go to any c++ forum or irc channel and they just won't do your homework for you. They will, however, help you figure out how to use the language to accomplish your task.
Is that cheating? of course not, as many professors tell you to use these forums to get help.
Ryerson University is simply behind the times and so are its professors. Some universities are like this. I'll bet Ryerson also keeps a hit list of students for the RIAA and MPAA.
They're using their grammar skills there.
In 1999 my physics class students got together and created a web forum that was anonymous and we all worked on the physics problems from the various tests.
Unfortunately for many students they did not actually learn the material, and many failed the tests, thus drive the curve for those who could answer the questions, meaning a lot of people got better grades than they would have otherwise.
The physics prof. found the page out, and would comment on it, but since no one could be found who had actually started the page and the forum didnt track anything, people would just post answers.
The last test in the class was crazy hard because it did not use any of the study examples that people had posted answers to on the forum.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I think you are correct. It is not reasonable to assume that students will do homework in isolation. Now with that said, and as an individual who has taught college level science classes, the PRIMARY AIM of homework is to tunnel the student in on principles that need to be looked at in depth. Furthermore in science it is VITAL that students communicate with and teach each other. The proof lies in the fact, that that even this Profs, only allowed for it to represent 10% of the work. The exam is the time when the knowledge of the individual is tested. I believe that this prof is way off base and really should think more about HOW HE TEACHES and tests his students. Classes I have taught include general chemistry, developmental biology, cell biology, and pathology.
[I]f I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this - and my prof sees this, am I cheating?
Yes, you are. School is not the real world, and you are expected to do your work by yourself unless collaboration is explicitly allowed. By the way, it's still cheating even if you never get caught. So, in your example, you're cheating whether or not the professor sees it.
You are an idiot. By that logic, I was cheating when I hired a tutor to help me through a unit of Discrete Math.I went to Ryerson. I got a pretty good education there, no complaints. But you do not go to Ryerson if you are looking for school spirit, social activism, or really much of anything beyond classwork.
As a "university experience", Ryerson gets smothered by its location in downtown Toronto. There really is no "campus" per se, as Ryerson feels more like a collection of buildings in the core of a large city. There is also relatively little availability of campus residency. The atmosphere is *very* apathetic, there's no popular places to hang out, and everyone leaves after they are done class.
So, no, there will be no protest to support this guy, I can pretty much guarantee it.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I actually graduated from Ryerson recently with a Civil Eng. Degree, and one of the physics and comp. sci profs already have bulletin boards set up for students to ask questions which they had problems with. They even have study halls for each section of engineering where large tables are set up for people to sit around, books open with their peers.
When is a person cheating? IMO it must include an intent to deceive; and that makes it very difficult to judge a case like this. What was the assignment - if it was "produce a report about so and so", then it should arguably be irrelevant whether the student did the work himself or went out and bought it; he delivered the goods. But of course this is not really the objective in a school - the objective is that the student should learn by performing the work himself.
That being said, there are some gray areas - I once, in an oral exam, proved a theorem by using an advanced result and then giving the proof for that result instead. Was that brilliant or was it cheating? Most would say that I didn't cheat, but what if the purpose was to demonstrate that I had learned and understood the techniques used in the intended proof? The advanced theorem I used had little bearing on the methods used in the course I was being examined in - I got high marks, but perhaps I was cheating?
I've not RTFA, so I can't speak to the specifics and I may be answering a charge that doesn't exist or is otherwise addressed. Still, I found that, during my undergrad and graduate engineering education, the students who knew how to find and assemble the right study groups did much better in class and had a better understanding of the material. Now, of course there was some "I've looked at problem 5 for 3 hours and don't understand it. What did you get?" type of soft cheating, but by and large, the study groups I was involved in were really training for trouble shooting, communication, teaching peers, and understanding others' methodologies. I hope that the very valuable experience of finding a group you can get along with, who shares your same level of academic commitment, and compliments your learning style, is not reduced because of fears of expulsion similar to this case.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
When I was in college (about 20 years ago), two of my friends were charged with "Academic Dishonesty" for working in a math study group. Oddly, after working together, they had the same answers. They didn't copy one to the other, the collaborated -- just as they were encouraged to by the dept.
The professor violated the school procedures in filing a charge before speaking with the students, and so the were let off with a mere warning not to let it happen again. No one ever made it clear if that meant study together or have a jerk professor not understand how to work with other humans.
This is the same thing only bigger. Either you have a policy that says all student work must be done individually, or you face the fact that some people will take more than their fare share out of a collaboration. Political Scientists and Economists will recognize this instantly. This is also why the homework is only 10% of the grade. Facebook won't help in the exam.
I was invited to a fraternity party recently by a friend who, while intelligent, was a bit to focused on the party scene and had to transfer to a state school. I'm not normally the frathouse type, but I figured it was something to try once. Anyways, at the house they had a "study room". In it was a filing cabinet with folders for almost any class you can think of. After any tests, homework, etc were graded, the frat brothers put it in the corresponding folder. I was told most of the professors know this goes on, and don't care, since they change the exams and homework each semester, so unless the underlying concepts are understood, the old tests won't help. That to me seems to be the way an academic institution should look at this sort of thing. The article also mentioned the students were physics students, so it's to be expected that in the real world they will collaborate on projects.
Preface: I'm a grad student who had to take most of the undergrad as a post-bac. This is my last semester, and my last two classes are a grad elective and an undergrad course that I'd like to know before my full-time job begins this summer.
But thats how it works in the real world, rarely do you work on a project by yourself.
Oh I know. This is career #2 for me, I've done the collaborative work before. OTOH, in the real world answers to the kind of small problems seen in homework is generally available from other textbooks, Google Scholar, or you can ask a PhD directly. Insisting on group work for these kinds of problems is probably helpful for the folks who are under 22 with no work experience, but for me it has been an extra hassle to informally "teach" on top of the rest of my workload (thesis + defense + other research).
Complain to your peers and then the professors if you really feel people arn't doing their fair share.
I can't really fault the undergrads for not being at the same level since I've had two brutal semesters of grad-level stuff already. However, I have asked about being separated and the profs are generally against it even when freeloaders are present because the leeches fail the exams anyway and the homework doesn't really count a lot towards the final grade. So I'm not penalized by grade, I just lose real time with the wife.
you just can't think of everything yourself.
My first career was IT-type stuff (hence the occasional Slashdot post). I've dealt with my share of not-invented-here(tm) and lone ranger coders. My next job will ultimately be all about making the lives of plant operators easier, so I intend to spend a lot of time out in the plant to better understand their needs. I'm also part of a large group of new hires who need to absorb as much knowledge as possible from the boomers before the begin retiring en masse, and I'm considering another master's later (to be taken much more slowly than this one) in communications precisely to help make it easier for people of very diverse backgrounds to work together.
Sorry you crazy kids, but this just seems to me, to be another article of people who don't understand technology (dinosaurs) reacting in whatever way their puny little brains can. Just because you teach at a university, doesn't mean you're smart.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Students should use whatever resources are available. I encourage study groups, and they really help a lot. So what if they are internet based groups. Other profs need to realize that study methods are flexible.
On the other hand, what I do NOT want to see is students just "getting answers" and not learning. Sure, you may get thru one homework, but when it comes to the exam, and you don't know how to do the problems because you copied rather than bothered to learn: too bad, so sad, here's your F. Don't bitch to me about it. Suck it up, and study properly next time.
As for argument about the books being used over and over again, and all the questions will be gone in the space of 3 semesters? That's a crock of crap too. If the professor be too lazy to at least modify the problems slightly, the can't complain if students memorized the problem and got it right. Example: I gave my freshman class a practice exam to study from, and on the real exam did things like change starting concentrations by half, or change NaOH to Ca(OH)2 (thus changing the stoichiometry). It was *really* easy to separate the memorizers from the ones who actually learned the material.
This isn't a direct response to you, tacocat, but it was a convenient place to jump in.
/want/ is to present the material, you to understand the material, and then you go off and solve problems based on that understanding. The last thing they want is to teach you a "technique" or a "formula" for solving problems, and you then can solve problems. They want you to /understand/ the subject, not just be able to solve problems.
I have been going to school a LONG time. It took me some 17 years to finish my BS in Computer Science, and I'm currently working on a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
I personally believe that ALL the answers should be made available to all questions posed to the students for assignments.
The solutions guide that they publish is great, but it only gives answers to half the problems. I want them all. Why? Because the way I learn a subject is exactly backwards of how they want me to learn it.
It has become obvious to me over the 17+ years of advanced education I have done that what professors
I hate this approach. I want to get straight to the punchline. I want to learn THE ALGORITHM TO IDENTIFY AND SOLVE A PROBLEM, not the underlying whys and wherefores. Then, armed with the algorithm, I go and do hundreds of problems, over and over again. THEN, somewhere along the way, the lightbulb goes on and I see the whys and wherefores. This is where having the worked-out solutions are awesome. I use them when I get stuck on a problem to work out where I went wrong in my algorithm for identifying and solving the problem.
Anyone who uses these answers just to cheat on their homework is going to totally fail the class, because you will BOMB THE TESTS. In fact, I don't think professors should even bother collecting homework. Those who are going to cheat are just going to cheat on it anyway, and then fail the class because they fail the tests. Those who weren't going to cheat but do the homework to gain understanding of how to solve the problems don't need their homework taken up anyway.
So in closing, I think all the answers should be made available to everyone. You use them as you may to understand how to solve problems. Then you will be tested to see how well you learned the techniques to solve different but similar problems.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I go to UVIC (www.uvic.ca) and study groups are enouraged, each one of my classes has one, each one of my lab sections has one, heck we organize our pubcrawls on there, even our lab TA's are the one's who started the group, it's a wonderful collaboration tool for asking questions or getting help, we dont copy eachother but we certainly try to help our whole group, I think it's crazy for that university not to embrace facebook, it's new technology, and its here to stay. It's progress, it's evolution. What's next? Ban access to the internet aswell so they cant get access to google or wikipedia? People need to understand that these are bring used as learning tools aswell, not just a place to tag pictures of your drunken friends.
https://tiger.ryerson.ca/phonebook/phonebook1.do
If anyone here is willing to help out the student, I'd suggest a polite, but firm, explanatory email to the members of the faculty involved in the expulstion decision.
If I'm not mistaken, the point of education is to gain knowledge and understanding of a subject. I never understood professors who made homework a sizable amount of you total grade. If I can prove on an exam or final project that I understand the material, who cares how I did on the homework. I believe that homework is a learning tool. Making students desperate to have correct answers on their homeworks hurts their ability to take the time to understand their homework and the material covered in it.
Is this university run by the RIAA?
Or do they just share an unnatural fear of Technology?
Either way, I don't see how this is cheating. Hows it different than a physical gathering of students doing the exact same thing?
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
I would argue the opposite point. You should often work by yourself.
Yes working with others is important, but you need to learn how to solve problems without relying on others. When two people work on the same problem, it is only worth it if you solve it twice as fast as you would have working alone. So most problems are more efficient to solve yourself, especially if you have experience doing that. In that way you improve your groups performance by not constantly asking them for help.
I am in a 'group' at work, but I have my job and I only collaborate with my teammates when it comes to larger issues or when I am truly stuck, and the less I need them the more time they can spend on their work, and vice versa.
Distributing work is efficient, and too many cooks often spoil the food. Extreme (multiperson) programming is rarely efficient.
Also, the less you need your peers, the less replaceable you look.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Nothing in either article (the one linked to or the original student article) said anything about answers actually being posted. I assume that there was some discussion about answers, but it certainly doesn't sound like this Facebook group was just a place to post answers for others to copy.
Instead, it seems this Facebook group is a place to discuss the homework and ask others for help. Considering that 90% of the class grade is from in class tests, I can't see how this Facebook group was cheating. If the Facebook group was just a place where answers were posted, and you merely copied down the answers and not do the homework, you'd flunk the tests. If you did the homework and used the Facebook site for peer-to-peer help, you'd do well on the tests.
Heck, I don't even understand why the teacher even bothers with grading homework. When I went to college, no one graded homework. As one professor told us, our homework grade is reflected in our test grades. (Homework was assigned and discussed in class, but never graded). If we do our homework, we get good test grades, if we didn't we'd flunk the tests. As the professor said, why do the extra work? Otherwise, we wouldn't have time to go to all those faculty wine and cheese parties we give each other.
.. we just went to the library and worked in groups there and helped each other out all the time. Was that cheating or helping each other out?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
While Neale admits the professor stipulated the online homework questions were to be done independently, she said it has long been a tradition for students to brainstorm homework in groups, particularly in heavy programs such as law, engineering and medicine.
So the students were supposed to do the work by themselves "independently"; but, the school has a tradition of ignoring independent work? Is this class part of a degree in political ethics?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I'm going to get radical and suggest that this may be the fault of bad teaching practices. If the students were simply uploading homework or test answers, as there have been cases of, that would be one thing. But I'm suspecting that this teacher is taking umbrage because it's showing how many of his students are not learning in his class and having to go for outside help. And possibly that the outside help is doing a better job than he is.
Too many college professors are not actually *teaching*. They may stand up for five minutes and then hand the class over to a graduate student while they go work on their next book. And while the professor may certainly know their field, they may not be all that good at showing others how they got there. The problem is most of the professors that are doing this have tenure. There is not guarantee of a job in the real world--there should be no guarantee of one at the University either.
Unfortunately the youthful student often gets intimidated when it should be the other way around. Students: You (or your parents) are PAYING these professors to TEACH you. You shouldn't feel like you have to kiss their ass just to be there. You have to do your part: You have to bring ability and the drive to work at it, including coming to class and paying attention. But they also have a part in this contract--they're supposed to be TEACHING you, not throwing a book at you, saying, "Read this and do problems 1-10."
Until the students AND the parents stand up and demand a better system, they are going to be a piss-poor education and ridiculous charges like this. That diploma isn't going to be worth the parchment costs if you can't perform the actual work once you get out. And if you have to get together so you can teach each other, why are you having to pay $$$ to get hassled over it?
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Metastory? Meatspace?
You've been browsing slashdot far too long, bud. Step AWAY from the screen...
And it doesn't help its practitioners. Keep in mind that even if you got every answer from the forum and it was always right (not guaranteed if you have no idea how things work or how to sift the right answers from the wrong) this was only 10% of the grade. The homework is just an exercise to get you to understand the subject, which is why it's such a low percent of the grade. The other 90% of the grade is presumably in lab work and exams where you can't just use a posting from the net. The only way a study forum helps is if the participants actually learn the topic at hand rather than just quoting others by rote.
And isn't that supposed to be the point of the exercise?
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
When I was in High School, I finally figured out that the homework was a total and complete waste of time, and never bothered with it. Then I'd go in and ace every test. It pissed teachers off to no end that I just didn't care that the final grade would be a B or C when my test scores were some of the best in the class.
I never did waste my time with college, and spent four years in the military instead. I learned more there than many college students, and came out easily $100k ahead, since that way resulted in being paid as opposed to paying out via loans and tuition.
If degrees are so worthwhile, then how do we explain Bill Gates? He dropped out and basically took over the entire software world. Motivation and natural talent count for a lot more than education.
I've known several self-made millionaires, and none of them had degrees, whereas the people I've met with Masters degrees tend to end up in a middle-tier corporate job and never really get ahead.
Maybe doing and learning on one's own removes barriers to thinking and allows success to actually happen.
I don't know how to tag a story, but my sense is that the South Park "Blame Canada" song applies ;-) .
The school should simply explain to the student why they feel that the group needs to be different and the student should make the required changes. It seems excessive to expel a student for doing things that are typically done by highly-competitive chemistry (and other natural science) students in the first place. If the school is there to educate, then they should teach the student why this was wrong and how it can be done "correctly."
This kind of cheating is not even the half of it; I remember talk of student labs being tampered with and contaminated to keep them from wrecking the curve for everyone else or because they did not like a particular student who was exceling in the class; of course, these were classes full of pre-med students who were in fierce competition with each-other for seats in medical school. Also, most of the pre-meds had copies of many years of old exams, including the answers.
Sadly, "It's only wrong if you get caught" applies here and this student should be encouraged to set a good precedent; encourage the kid to run a Facebook study group with the approval of the school in a way that supports the school's mission.
>When I was in college, the point was that I myself solve those differential equations problem. If I had somebody
>else figure it out for me, then I missed the point of the class. Too many students these days think the point of
>college is getting your homework done. It's not! The point is to DEVELOP YOUR MIND!
The point of college is getting high marks in your classes, so you can get a degree and make money. If I can do all that without developing my mind, that's OK with me.
If you cheat on your homework, you are going to fail your exams and probably not graduate. It's a self-correcting problem.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Its probably for the better; Ryerson Engineering isn't real Engineering anyway ;)
On a related note, Camp1's Iron Ring Ceremonies were Wednesday and Thursday. Congratulations to all the freshly obligated Engineers! (Myself included =)
Aikon-
Most professors I have had employed a very graceful solution to this: the grade in the class is based entirely on the exams, or perhaps a combination of attendance and exams. Homework exercises are suggested, but they are not graded nor collected -- they're meant simply to be representative of what is on the exam, so students who choose to study can do so more efficiently.
Students should flood the system with complaints about cheating for EVERY tutorial, meatspace study group, or online post about homework or other academic activity they can find. Get the student body as close to 100% expulsion-qualified as you can get.
When the various departments are spending their time in hearings, all of which will be appealed to the unbiversity senate (more hearings) and recorded in the papers ... they will have to recruit a whole new student body. Or back down. If they back down for one, there is the precedent and they are all back in, or the uni gets sued big-time for discrimination.
It's like the "let's all get arrested" civil rights ploy. Jam the process.
"Copying the answer is cheating"
You are correct. However, the answers can be found via Google anyway. It is impossible to isolate students from any ability to circumvent learning. This tool, like any other tool, can be used in both beneficial and detrimental ways.
"there should be rules that..."
This is very dangerous. Excessive policies, "zero tolerance", and rigid rules are only beneficial in situations where you know your faculty is too incompetent to be trusted with decision making. The greatest thing about the Andy Griffith Show was his amazing ability to weigh situations and make the decision that was best for the conflict. No preconceived policy could ever out perform brilliant decision making. The schools need to be able to trust the decision making ability of the faculty, and not make rules/policy to preempt them. If such rules are needed, the problem is not the lack of rules, but the hiring of incompetent instructors. Then either the school, or the people paying for the school, need to resolve that issue.
When my wife was in university she had to take a "final exam" 2 hours after having a life threatening cancerous tumor removed due to a short sighted "zero tolerance" policy. The anesthesia hadn't even worn off yet. As a result, she received the only B grade of her otherwise A career.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
Unless this is some kind of hoax, I think the /. community should contact this university and politely explain how the world is changing in the information age.
Maybe they should sneaker net it at Ryerson, like the cubans are doing. http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/06/1717242.shtml/ Face it, students have been and will be sharing answers and test questions as long as there is school. So lets work together towards a better future of directly implanted knowledge.
is like hiring the Olsen Gang to rob your bank.
They even mention this in the high-school admissions orientation. Homework has to be designed a little bit differently with fewer, but more substantial problems. You have to show all your derivations and everyone sign the paper.
You know, I'm in high school, currently taking a few classes at the local university...and as much as their Computer Science department is a joke, they're at least reasonable and know what they're doing. The guy teaching my current class is an IBM employee, only teaches this one class...but he said to us the first day of class, we can use anything we want, talk to each other, google it, do whatever to get the answer. In the real world, there will never be a time when you can't look something up. And if we don't know anything, it'll be pretty obvious on the midterm and final.
You would think professors would know better. Who ever does any work completely on their own without any references? Maybe Einstein, Tesla, and Hawkings, but that's probably about it. Giving someone an answer, yes, that's cheating. Guiding someone to an answer, however, is teaching.
Rule for the class: Homework to be done individually. Student starts group asking others to post answers. Open and shut case of breaking academic integrity.
Yes, yes, you can complain all you like about whether or not it's a good idea to do homework alone, but if you break the rules, claim something is your own work done with no help (ie by submitting homework and not telling the professor you broke the rules), then you're in the wrong. Headline should really read "Student openly violates rules of class, gets caught, now whines about it." If you don't like the rules, ask the prof. to change them, or petition the department. Homework is a valuable indicator of where students need more attention and help in class - if the ones having trouble just copy the answers this tool becomes useless.
jhanigsb@ryerson.ca , credmond@ryerson.ca , fdshaikh@ryerson.ca , pres@ryerson.ca , emcginn@ryerson.ca That's the president, board of governors, and legal counsel. Here's what I wrote...
Ryerson leadership,
I recently read the article below on Chris Avenir's Facebook Chemistry study group:
http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/309855
This activity is also the subject of discussion on an Online Rights group at:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/07/0355244
My view is that the school should explain to the student why the group needs to be different and the student should make the required changes. Since the university's purpose is to educate, you should teach the student what specifically was wrong and how it can be done correctly.
Expulsion should be used as a last resort for students who are beyond reach. In this case, you have a first-year student who created a support group for academic improvement. Discipline of this sort will discourage the use of the Web as a medium for collaborative education as illustrated in the quotes below from Ryerson students:
"All these students are scared s---less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it's no different than any study group working together on homework in a library," said Neale.
"That's the worst part; it's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this - and my prof sees this, am I cheating?" said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.
The article also mentions that Avenir "is still attending classes pending his hearing but admits the stress of the accusations is affecting his midterm exam results." In my opinion, the university's behavior borders on harrassment, because it is negatively affecting the student's academic performance.
The university has an opportunity to set a good precedent for collaborative education on the Web for present and future students. Please encourage the student to run a Facebook study group with the approval of the school in a way that supports the school's mission. The student needs to know how the group needs to be different and the student will make the required changes to abide by school policy.
I'm one of those "full time students who just woke up at the crack of noon and strolled over to the library" except I am the one doing the work for my international student group members who "are from all over the world and apparently it's quite acceptable in their cultures to do absolutely EVERYTHING together, including xerox their answers before handing them in."
Don't confuse late sleepers or full time students who live on campus with the ones who don't do their work!
Why do you assume I was the guy in the group who couldn't do the problem sets on my own?
Actually, I was that guy, sort of - I had no problems understanding the work, and was the guy who taught the rest of the group how to do the work. But the problem sets STILL sucked ass, and it would have been much more of a challenge to get motivated to do them without the group environment and the trip to the bar after the set was done.
I think I was one of a very few students who actually got an A in that class - and because of that class, also decided that my engineering career was going to be all digital.
paintball
Or possibly, these are the students who previously cheated and got away with it?
This reminds me a lot of a story I read once about a professor who had a blinding flash of the obvious (I wish I could remember who it was now). Basically, he instituted a new rule in his classroom which was this:
"Cheating is defined as refusing to give assistance when asked."
That's it. Everyone was expected to ask everyone else questions on all subjects at all times, even during (especially during) tests, and everyone was expected to give help when asked for it.
Of course, the administration didn't like this, and called the professor in for a reprimand. The administrator in question actually ended up saying "Do you realize what woould happen in this university if all the students began helping one another?" To his credit, apparently he followed this statement with a period of silence and then "I'll have to think about this," before finally letting the Prof do what he wanted.
In the end, the result was instead of the "normal" bell-curve of grades in the class, he ended up with a sort of two-peak curve for each assignment. The large peak, making the vast majority of the students, was at the "A" end of the spectrum--since collaboration was total, everybody had access to the best methods and answers. The other smaller peak was at the "F" and "D" end, and simply represented students who had fundamentally misunderstood the assignment.
when I taught programming at the University of Nebraska, it was obvious when students cheated. They would not even bother to change method or variable names. These were the same people who got indignant when you called them on it. In fact, they were just lazy and did not want to work.
I think working in groups on assignments is a good idea when the class sizes are fairly large. I think its unfair to allow large classes AND disallow group work since its probably difficult for most of the students to get any real attention from the instructor. So group work definitely helps here. At the same time if you're skeptical about these folks learning anything at all : higher level classes tend to be a lot smaller and you should be able to design higher-level courses to filter students who really don't know enough to advance.
Where I went to college, homework was graded so you knew how you did on it, but it did not count at all towards the grade. Therefore, there was no incentive to cheat on it. The only things that counted were the exams. The whole point of the homework was to learn the material. You could learn it in whatever way worked for you - independent study, study groups, copying answers, etc. But if you didn't actually learn the stuff, you were screwed at exam time. That system worked quite well.
Your viewpoint on this is messed up.
I wouldn't care one whit if students studied together or posted their problems asking for help. These are not the kids to fail. The ones that deserve to fail are the ones that don't even look at the problems, don't care how to solve them, and don't seek out the information needed to do so.
It is one thing to pass off someone else's work as your own. I have a problem with out-and-out plagiarism. On the other hand, I have no problem with a student that openly cites a source, even if the quotation from that source constitutes the whole of the assignment. Why? Because if that is a possible response to the assignment I've given, the problem is clearly with the assignment and not with the student.
So how would my class run? Simple—your final grade has two components: 75% test scores and 25% demonstrated originality of thought. 75% of your score, therefore, comes from proctored exams in the context of an environment where rules are enforced that require you to demonstrate the knowledge is actually yours. The rest of your score comes from your homework, and is assessed based upon the originality of your work. If you choose to seek out and cite other sources, as long as you disclose them, then great, you've done the assignment but perhaps scored no points (unless the selection and presentation of citations themselves show relevant originality).
We must not forget that the role of the school is to provide access to knowledge to students that want it. The rules should be constructed around favoring and assisting those that fall into this category, not around punishing those that fall outside it.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Note to students: use alias, nickname, or pseudonym when attending study group online.
I was with you up to the point you went off on single studiers with "This chem prof must be one of those jackasses who, while still in school, did all of his work alone and refused to lend assistance to any of his fellow students, especially if there was no tutoring credit. And he's probably justifying his own selfishness by imposing the same standards that he idealized as a student upon his students."
Studying by yourself makes you a selfish jackass? I was unaware that we all have a moral duty to help those lazier than us. I tried to be part of those groups a few times, but I found that people tended to spend most of the time chatting. I don't even know how they ever got any significant amount of homework done.
Cow Cube
I can ask for help from my team, but we all have our own tasks to perform. Nobody likes a coworker who is used to working things out as a group, because there is rarely time to do that. We were hired to be self-starters. Maybe it's different where you are.
Blar.
needless to say, this is academic cheating. if the honor code says "dont do it", you do not do it. why does it differ from three students sharing answers in the library? here there is solid evidence [1] that would be conclusive in favor of the university if the student presses charges. which seems very likely in this case. [1] the facebook group, that presumably the teacher/TA kept for records
This is so stupid. I'm in High School and all my teachers keep telling me is that businesses want team players, who know how to get things done. And with websites like Sparknotes, Yahoo Answers, and even the invention of such efficient seach engines like Google its completely absurd to think that going it alone is gonna get you through that ivy leauge university you're attending or that AP Chemistry class. The stakes of what you're suppose to know once in school is continuously rising. Why would anyone want to destroy a study group? I read up in the posts that the school is not in the US but is this type of behavior acceptab;e anywhere?
I am a lowly high school student... please dont assume im an expert.
I did do all the problem sets - at least the ones I turned in. (It's been a while, so I don't know that I may not have skipped a couple.) I was the guy who taught the REST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE GROUP how to do the problem sets.
Problem sets were due on Wednesday. We'd get together on Tuesday and spend HOURS working through them damned problem sets. It was hard. I would figure the problem out, and then help the other guys (and the occasional girl) figure it out. And once we all had our homework done, we'd go to the bar.
Now, we all did the work. Some of the other people in the group had help from me in doing the work - but I don't see how that's any different than getting help from the TA to do the work. Ultimately, I did tend to do better on the exams than most everyone else in the group, but that seemed mainly to be that I could finish the exam in the allotted time and they had difficulty doing that, which isn't much of a surprise since the problem sets were comparatively easier for me as well.
But all that said, the problem sets STILL sucked. They were hard, and for some reason my usual geek curiosity was of no help in making them interesting. As a result, my motivation to actually do the damned things was pretty tiny, but the peer pressure of a group of people coming over to pick my brain was a good motivating factor to sit down and actually do them.
10 years of work in the digital/software world later, other than the very basic understanding of what a Fourier transform is, I really have no recollection on how to apply the math. But I will say that Analog Signal Processing was probably one of the 4 or 5 classes I took in my degree area in college where I actually learned something I didn't already know and could have applied later. (there were only 2 or 3 where I learned something I didn't know and actually applied it later.)
paintball
This just goes to show how antiquated our schools and universities have become. They've taken so long implement internet-based learning, and when they do, all they can think of is online quizzes and retarded video lectures. When some student shows them how to do it, and what the internet is really useful for, the only thing they can think to do is expel them. What a bunch of idiots.
I can't believe our politicians are always clamoring to give more money to traditional education institutions. They're practically worthless.
It sounds like Ryerson University is regressing in education delivery methods by demonizing the use of Facebook. I'm an instructor in a post secondary technical institute and the big push in curriculum is collaborative learning through online social networks like facebook, msn and wikis. I'm getting accolades from fellow instructors for using wikis, having open book exams, take home finals, etc.. I've been asked to present at teaching excellence seminars.
As an example, I use wikis for the students to write their lab reports and to create lecture notes. The lab reports encourage sharing of experiences with an emphasis on problems encountered. The wiki lecture notes allow students with different learning styles to concentrate on the lecture and contribute later. The wiki lecture notes created are simply amazing. Think about it - 20 or 30 students collaborating together to research, edit and publish one article on each lecture!
Students are encouraged to read, edit, add and modify the wikis with their interpretations. We're able to do 21 labs in the same amount of time that it used to take to do 14! The goal is learning by doing and learning from the knowledge of others. Traditionally, we could do one lab in a 3 hour period. Now, its common for a student pair to complete 3 labs in the same time frame.
Ryerson - YOU"RE DOING IT WRONG!
This story as written stinks. I expect better journalism from Slashdot. The heading and lead give no explanation as to the stated policy by the university, and there's only an off-hand remark by some observer. Slashdot doesn't have to be unbiased but should at least re-state what the basic policy and objections are on both sides. I still don't have a clue what the university's official policy is on the issue. Sheeeesh! I was going to say something lame like "I can appreciate the arguments on both sides" ... that is if I knew what they were.
-BG-
Some may say there is no reason to re-invent the wheel. What is the difference between finding the exact answer in a book and asking someone for the answer? The difference is there is effort in research. This is the 'point' of study. I don't agree with expelling the student, but it is the teacher's job to make sure the student studies. That is one reason people pay for college. There are always people who say they didn't need to go to college because they read the same books and what not. They themselves also miss a big point. It is the time and energy spent doing the 'stupid assignments', talking to fellow students and seeing all the hybrid of different ways to do the same problem that truly makes the mind grow. Why do you think those like Socrates were who they were? For the most part, a bunch of them would just sit around, blab about things, get into an argument (i.e. an assignment) and they would each present their answers to each other (Grades). The book is just an instrument of discussion in college, and in any class, or at least it should be. Anyone who just asks a bunch of people for an answer on a news group is doing the same thing as turning to the student next to them and looking at their work. No effort. Nothing learned. F-, but expulsion is too much.
I said: "If you cheat on your homework, you are going to fail your exams and probably not graduate. It's a self-correcting problem."
I am NOT endorsing CHEATING.
I am saying that the answers to ALL HOMEWORK PROBLEMS should be PROVIDED so that when you work the problem and get STUCK, you have the SOLUTION to show you HOW YOU SCREWED UP.
And, LIKE I SAID, if you just use those answers to CHEAT ON YOUR HOMEWORK, you are going to FAIL your exams.
If you CHEAT on your homework, odds are high you will never BECOME a doctor, or a software developer, or work for Microsoft.
It is very hard to cheat your way to a degree, unless you can find some novel way to cheat on tests and not get caught.
Your post is insulting.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.