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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."
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.
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?
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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.
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.
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.
... except that Ryerson is in Toronto, Canada. Not the US.
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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."