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."
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.
Why use Google or read books/datasheets/tfm, when you can just post your question and expect a ready-to-use answer some time later ? (If the latter doesn't occur, jump up and down, pout and insult the members of the discussion forum)
Is it reasonable to assume that every student will carry out their homework assignment in isolation? I don't think it is. It's not really commendable that someone took it upon themselves to go for a more organised approach to 'cheating' but I'd say that if the university wants assignments to be carried out by individuals alone they have a duty to provide invigilated exam halls rather than setting a practically unenforceable condition and kicking anyone out who they happen to find breaking it.
Thousands of other students will have broken this rule in the past sitting around a library table or a kitchen counter - why did the university let them get away with it?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Is it any co-incidence that the guy's name means 'the future' in French?
-1 not first post
Why are they still letting 146 other students get way with it and just going after the administrator of the site?
Oh, of course, if they kicked out all the students that were using the facebook group, there wouldn't be anybody left on the course and they wouldn't get all that nice money they provide. Much better just to pick one scapegoat to make an example of.
Sounds like a typical US college knee-jerk over-reaction. We can do it so we will... tremble in fear, puny students at the might of THE ADMINISTRATION...!
The reason is that cheater needs to be caught red-handed. If it is just a small cheating group assembled in the library table or the canteen, there is not enough incentive for the university to try to get them. The group is too small, could easily hide the evidence and there are dozens of such groups around.
Now, if one tries to have a group the size of 100+ students in the library, canteen or anywhere in the premises. I'm sure there is more than enough incentive for the university to get them. Much like what they're doing here. And besides the evidence is as plain as the midday sun (w/o clouds).
This is approaching cheating. You have a historical record of the questions and eventually direct answers to the homework questions. Remember, these questions generally come from books which are used over and over. So by the third semester these books are going to be pretty well answered on the internet.
What makes this different is that most people work out the problem with their peers and then move on, not keeping the answers out on the table for the next group of students. It's collaborative problem solving, not collaborative problem/answer posting. The real damage can be that no one learns anything other than how to sign-up to Facebook and troll for answers.
Volatile methods should be considered acceptable: IM, IRC, Email (without archives). These promote collaboration without promoting copy/paste.
I personally did very little with collaborative study groups because I found too often I was shelling out answers to people who were just writing stuff down and never returning any value to the group or me personally. As such, I saw no value to my academic career in continuing this practice. I would not advocate anyone seriously invest as this being the only study means, you just don't learn that much, like problem solving.
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
The difference here is that Google will certainly provide examples of similar problems, but the student will still have to apply these examples to the specific problem in hand. It is to be hoped that this will at least force them to demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of the problem. Where they can just take the precise answer off Facebook and change a few words, no understanding is required at all. Even in my day, course work of this nature was always at risk of collaboration. With the information now available at the keyboard, it seems completely devalued. As another poster has said, invigilated exams must form a critical part of any assessment.
It is analogous to job interviews. People can look great on a CV. A lot of them look far less impressive when I put them in front of computer and give them 40 minutes to complete a programming test.
Au contraire, this is the only thing that helped me through my EE class last semester. Maybe you're too smart to need it, but I always understood 80% of my homework and earned the rest of the understanding by attacking the problem as a group. Having a collaborative study group taught me virtually everything in that class; the instructor was terrible.
My point is, what works for one person doesn't for another, and vice-versa. I favor the collaborative approach over the solitary. I haven't RTFA, though I should, but suggesting approaches without giving out answers sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
I know the above is a +5 funny comment, but seriously, this would be a perfect opportunity for students to do what they used to do best. Protest.
147 offenses? Why so many?
Seriously! This looks like something straight out of the RIAA playbook.
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.
From what I have been able to gather, the US educational system (at least university level and above) is very competitive. I guess this does mean you get people being nasty to get better status.
However, the post grad careers options are also correspondingly better in the US then they are in the UK where I live (certainly in the academic field). That means more people want that option, so competition again increases. You can't have that without having barstards taking advantage of the system.
Things aren't always better here in the UK for students though. You often find that to get the best projects (or more importantly, project supervisors) as an undergrad, you can't just sit in line, you have to stand out. That means getting the good grades. Same goes for phd places. Unless you really stand out, you won't have nearly as much chance of being able to pick and choose. That's too much pressure for some, and they resort to cheating or underhand behavior.
I had several phd offers, and could take my time selecting the one I wanted. I had to work like a slave for years to make sure I got those offers though. Had I not done this I probably would have been stuck on the pile of applicants at some other university, which is not a good negotiation position. I know others cheated to try and get the same results as I and some friends were obtaining through sweat, tears, and a lack of beer. It's too tempting not to for some. Unfortunately people who serially cheat also find final exams cripplingly hard, so it sort of balances out.
Let me get this straight: US Universities have a culture of social climbing, and your evidence to this theory is an incident in which two Indian students reported you. You may want to take stock of your prejudice. If you need help, start with this statement: "Apparently two Indian students striving to become fledging proto-Americans . . ."
The instructor has constructed the class in such a way so that the homework contributes to the educational process of the class,
Says who?
If this is true, then let the students copy all the homework they want. They'll fail the exams anyway.
And if it's not true, then let the students copy all the homework they want, because it is not their fault their professor sucks and wants to use their grade to force them to do homework that isn't teaching them anything.
Don't cheat on exams. Don't turn in papers you didn't write. But problem sets should be optional.
When I was in school, we'd get together in groups of 2-15 to do problem sets. Some kids figured most of it out and taught the other kids until they knew what was up too, and some other kids just showed up and leeched answers. The leechers failed the exams. This is no different than doing it on Facebook except Facebook is more efficient. The people who learn the material will pass and those who don't will fail.
It's not cheating until the people who don't learn the material start passing.
paintball
You're talking about Zeno's paradoxes, I presume. Nice way to generalize cultural differences. For sure, being in the US for all of two years makes you an expert on how US schools are run and your encounter with two Indian students surely makes you an expert on Indian culture too. Because, as we all know Indian culture is a big monolithic bloc, Indian individuals really have no individuality and a sample size of two is statistically representative. Fortunately for you, I'm not going to judge you as a person or decide what Europe is like just based on your post.
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 have been teaching undergraduate physics for about four years now. I specifically ask my students to work in groups of two to three, and to hand in their work as a group.
Besides saving the supervisors a load of time during correction, this encourages collaborative behaviour. Good students learn while explaining the subject to their peers. The slower students learn by having in effect a second, more hands-on lecture, by one of their peers. During my own undergraduate years, most of my professors did ask us to work in teams, and I always felt like I was learning much more, while working much more efficiently.
Of course, it is possible for people to "cheat" their way through this. So far, I haven't seen this happen too often, for two reasons: Peer pressure (if you don't contribute to the team, your mates won't want to work with you next term) and actual exam pressure (the final mark consists purely of the exam result, which is of course done by everyone individually). The examples I set are just (and I make that clear at the beginning of term) examples. They are an offer to you to learn something. You can choose not to take this offer up, it's your decision, you're an adult.
But is it collaborative if you can come in after the fact, see what other people have done and write down the answers yourself without any interaction with the original group. The people who gathered together to solve the problem initially was collaborative learning. Anyone after that is cheating.
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.
Well give him a break, he is obligated to do that! The article states that Ryerson's academic misconduct policy defines misconduct as:
any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, [...].
So clearly - since learning would give you an academic advantage - it would have to be treated as misconduct. Same for any study method which has the potential to be efficient.
you've never taking Chem 184 or whatever the first level of Chemistry was called? My class had 834 students to start, and about 200 at the end. 147 could have been the final number in my class in 1989.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Seriously! This looks like something straight out of the RIAA playbook
You mean, kind of like how slashdot runs twenty panicky anti-RIAA articles every week, followed by tens of thousands of identical, breathless accusations of fascism? Why so many?
When someone is trying to make a point about someone else's behavior, it's pretty reasonable to point out patterns, rather than single incidences.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Information is not the same as understanding. Besides that, there's something to be said for having someone else pay for some of the more expensive/dangerous equipment that you'll need to use, including, but not limited to, a wide variety of acids, oscilloscopes, software licenses, mass spectrometers, and all manner of other things. Even if you're the sort of person who can learn from the book without the teacher's help, the university still provides materials to you.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Is this about discussing problems collaboratively, or is it about copying someone else's answers and representing them as your own? If it's the latter, why shouldn't the grading system recognize the students that make the effort to understand the problems and work them out independently?
Real learning requires time and effort, and yes, this does cut into the time we have available for partying, gaming and our Facebook friends. It's a tragedy that universities are giving degrees to people who see actual learning, understanding and problem solving as dispensible barriers to their success. That leaves it to employers to find their own ways of separating wheat from chaff, because degrees and grades no longer signify anything. It does explain a lot of the people I encounter who seem almost completely clueless in their own supposed fields, however...
AMEN!
I been teaching (about 18 years) freshman/sophomore level physics, primarily engineering students. I try to encourage study groups outside of class and my most successful years as a teacher are when the students are successful in forming these groups.
I also subscribe to the "see it, do it , teach it " philosophy of learning where you develop the deepest understanding of materials when you are forced to explain it to someone else. I use this argument on my better students and the result generally is better performance all around.
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.
Depends on your definition of the real world. In college, I took multiple courses where I never attended the lectures or the discussions, unless there was a test or a quiz scheduled, since I lived over an hour away from campus. After one 300 level comp sci course, I got an e-mail from the professor congratulating me on getting the highest grade in the course, but mentioned that he had tried to find me in the lectures a few times, but could never seem to find me. I sent him a message back explaining that I had never actually attended the lecture.
He sent me another message asking if I thought attendance should be mandatory, and my response was that I wouldn't have been able to get the highest score in the course if I didn't understand the material, and that I thought mandatory attendance only held back people that don't take much from the lectures. He agreed with that logic, and didn't change the course. I think that professors that require mandatory attendance either aren't self starters that are capable of teaching themselves course material without guidance, or are conceited enough to believe that it isn't possible to learn the material without their expert tutelage.
In the real world, I work as a consultant, and I bill almost all of my work with fixed rate firm quotes. I have control over how, when, and what work gets done, and because I'm getting paid the same regardless of the amount of time it takes, I am seriously motivated to get things done as efficiently as possible. Not attending lectures that were unnecessary when I could teach myself the material in less time helped develop this real world skill.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
At the school where I did my undergraduate work, we had an academic honor code that explicitly forbade reusing your own work without proper citation. It was considered plagiarism. We never got recycled homeworks like your example, so it really was quite reasonable. An honor code that is strongly respected and enforced can actually create an environment of great freedom, because you know the boundaries and the professors trust you. As an example, exams were never proctored; you could have 50 students working on the same test in a room with no professor, and nobody would even think of cheating. It's really nice to be treated as an adult.
When it comes to concerns of academic misconduct, I've found that the best policy is to talk to the professor about it beforehand. Having an open channel of communication will help to build trust on both sides, not to mention keeping you out of trouble for misunderstandings like that.
I would rather be killed by a terrorist than enslaved by my government.
Most of those are useful for peer review of your work. Once someone has created a creative work, they have become the least effective reviewer of that work, and additional eyeballs are going to be needed to make the essay or paper as effective as it can be. Now, I don't know whether or not tuition costs are weighted based on equipment costs, but even if they aren't, the university is a single entity, and using material-light classes to subsidize the material-heavy classes is a valid strategy. There are certainly going to be bottlenecks where the universities could become more effective, but in my experience, those are going to be the professors who have trouble adapting. I know I had more than a few "this is how I learned it, so this is how you're going to have to learn it" instructors, and I would say that this is without a doubt the biggest issue facing students.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
There is a big difference between working in groups where everyone helps each other out, and working in groups where once one person figures it out, everyone just copies and moves on to the next problem.
The first one, where everyone still does the problem and understands where the solution came from, is ok. Even if you ask a friend who has already done the problem for *direction*, that's ok.
But, when an answer is posted, and everyone just copies said answer and does not understand where it came from, then that's cheating, and it must be handled properly. This is no better or worse than telling each other the answer on a curbside or in a dorm room, but the large scale of those affected online is why this could be a much larger problem. (although obvious copying should always be handled even if it's just two people.)
Sometimes there is a fine line between the two, and the schools till typically overreact poorly if they think case one is case two. If this guys was posting answers, and there is no way for the class instructor or TA's to moderate said solutions, then he needs to be taken down.
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.
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.
It's a cozy thought to think he'd be fine if the intentions of the group were more 'honest', but you can't really say he would, unless you're on a board or two at Ryerson.
The metastory is the important bit here; as we careen headfirst into the Web 2.0 world and our meatspace lives become increasingly public in the blue nowhere, how are the rules changing? In particular, is the academic world just a little slow in adjusting centuries of tradition to cope with the changing lives of students?
If my university couldn't offer me coursework better than copy-to-pass, I would probably withdraw. In this particular case I think Ryerson is justified because of the technicalities of the wording of the group. This poor shmoe probably never thought to change the greeting message on the group when he took over, so he's basically getting slammed over somebody else's words because he assumed their position when he took over their job of running this group.
Goddamn shame, really.
Honestly, a degree from that university is worthless. A university with policies like that is hardly more than a degree mill in my opinion. Unmodified tests with answers being sold? Seriously if you wouldn't mind telling us where you got your degree we can all know to file anyone from there in the "almost certainly worthless" candidates folder.
... except that Ryerson is in Toronto, Canada. Not the US.
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The reason is that cheater needs to be caught red-handed.
That doesn't adequately explain it. There were 147 students in that facebook study group. One student was charged with 147 counts of misconduct, one for his own participation and one for each other participant. The case for scapegoating is fairly clear.
It's easy to catch the cheaters: if they cheat on homework, they have to cheat to pass on the exams as well.
With respect to a math and science class, homework isn't meant to be done in isolation, and it certainly isn't meant to be assigned the same ethically rigorous standards of conduct that tests demand. Fundamentally, the purpose of homework is to encourage collaboration, so that the students can collectively supplement the teachings in class. Doing homework together isn't cheating. Getting the answers from someone else for a piece of homework isn't cheating. Finding the questions online and copying the answers verbatim isn't cheating. It isn't even plagurism, because there are a limited number of ways of solving each problem, and there's no expectation that every individual turn in their assignment with a novel solution--well, unless nobody in class knows just what the hell is going on and everybody's trying to BS their way through the problem hoping to get a few lucky points.
On the other hand, the understanding (and purpose) of an exam is that of individual knowledge and achievement. And that's the time to catch the cheaters who copy homework from others verbatim.
Obviously, different standards apply to liberal arts classes, where exams do not usually produce meaningful information, and hence where there actually is an expectation of novelty for assignments. But the arts stand diametrically opposed to math and science, as unlike math and science, there are no "right" or "wrong" results, only defensible and indefensible results.
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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
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.
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. =====
I never cheated, simply because I never cared enough about grades, but I certainly understand the impetus behind a lot of cheating. In fact, of people I knew that DID cheat, I would say they were on average MORE capable than their classmates, and quite often outscored them on exams. I would venture a guess that at least 90% of cheating is due to laziness, not because the material is too challenging. Education through the undergraduate level is far too easy and well-formulated for anyone with half a brain to have real trouble if they are dedicated; it's the dedication that is the problem. And once you get to graduate studies, there usually aren't TOO many people that could really help you cheat, so the problem decreases sharply.
-----[0_o]-----
We are not amused.
YOU missed the point about what a monumental waste of trust and time that exercise is.
I *am* a college teacher. I teach a sophomore-level statistics class. On the first day of class I hand everyone a formula card and say, "The point of this class is not to memorize formulas, it's to learn how to use them. You can use this card on all your tests." Done.
Same lesson -- 1 minute flat. Then I also get in a full lecture about organizing data. And I don't have to lie to them about made-up, never-recorded grades.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes