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."

Comments

Re:The guy cheated

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, if you had rtfa you would have seen:

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.

"They'd say to each other stuff like ... `Remember what to do when you have positive cations (a type of positively charged ion)' and that sort of thing," she said. Its not cheating per-se, but granted; it may have been against the university rules.
otoh though - the same applies to study groups in libraries, and they were left untouched according to tfa

Re:I shall answer the question!

[TapeCutter]

Provided a student can't pass a course without passing the exam then IMHO it doesn't really matter if the text book answers are on the net.

I used to teach a C programming lab class at uni (circa 1992-4), I twice had students hand in printouts of someone else's work, right down to the mandatory name and student id in the comment header! Out of a class of ~40 there really were only a handfull of original works, the rest were original crap or 'derivitave works'.

The 'derivitave works' show that students collaborate, but to some degree that's what is SUPPOSED to happen. No matter how simply you explain pointers in C only about 10-15% will have it sink in on the second presentation, they had already seen it once in the lecture.

I would sometimes question the derivative works that I randomly judged as 'too similar'. The best reason I got was: "We are husband and wife, you want us stop talking about our studies."

Re:I shall answer the question!

[mmyrfield]

Not sure what the academic misconduct policies at your university were, but nowadays (at least where I go to school) doing what you describe carries a minimum penalty of failure in the course and a one year suspension from studies. In one of my courses, the prof claims to have retroactively failed and suspended students that shared their completed assignments from previous terms with students taking the current offering.

Re:147 offences?

[OAB_X]

It's so many because that's the number of people in the Facebook group.

SPecifically he is charged with academic misconduct (which is able to be punished by expulsion), because the group advertised not just "help" (like hints) but "post answers", and because people presumably handed in those answers it's plagerism (the questions that had answers given were requrired to be handed in and worth 10% of their mark). It's one of those really fine lines that was probably crossed, but it may not have been by him, perhaps just the people who joined the group. In that case they "should" have charged _EVERY_ student in the group with misconduct, clearly this isn't happening.

However, the administration is hampered by the rules which say that they MUST hold an appeals hearing if a professor alledges academic misconduct (it is the professor who reports plagerism, and the professor who submits a recommendation on action to be taken by the administration, in this case, the proff wants him to be expelled)

Article from the student newspaper: http://www.theeyeopener.com/article/3816

Full disclosure: I'm a student at Ryerson, but not involved in this at all, and I don't think he should be expelled.

Re:Then you missed out

[SuperDuck]

I find it rather interesting that this article's replies have all assumed that this is an American university.

Ryerson University is located in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

And what's getting this student in trouble is the invitation to the Facebook group where it requests the posting of final full solutions, rather than warning against it. If he had just asked for solution techniques and advice, and stated without ambiguity that posting of final solutions is a no-no, he would have been fine.

RTFA, and also please don't assume that we only have igloos and polar bears up here. ;-)

Faculty contact page

[MrMista_B]

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.