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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."
Is there any school level science problem for which the solution can't be found via judicious use of Google?
Depends on the prof.
You have to keep in mind that that if you post it you are also giving a chance to a social climber from cultures where such social climbing is cherished to report you. Though, based on personal experience they usually report the person who will help you.
I studied in a US university for 2 years. At the end of the second year we had to hand in coursework for a "philosophy of science" course. We were allowed and actively encouraged to discuss our findings. Which we did as a group - me and 3-4 US students. I organised the group and helped others with research on some of the topics like the Xenon paradoxes as they required math knowledge to understand and analyse properly. All of us had an A grade for the class and the coursework. I went home for the summer and was contacted near its end. Apparently two Indian students striving to become fledging proto-Americans got sub-A grades due to us blowing the curve. So to fix their grades they officially complained about me for copying from the American student coursework (in reality none of us copied anything, and it was me helping my mates, not vice versa).
At that point I decided that I have had enough of arseholes and social climbers and I decided to finish my education in Europe. Which I did and I never regretted the decision.
Frankly, I can understand this student. Been there, done that. Decided that the best idea is to tell the University to f*** off and go somewhere where writing defamatory letters onto other students is not a preferred means of academic and personal career advancement.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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
That thought occurred to me too. Sort of a way of going by the rules and gaming the system at the same time.
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
my school has group "study" rooms in the library. you have to get a key to use one of the rooms and the only way to get a key is by signing up a group of people.
"To stop the terrorists."
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.
Not quite so.
Put yourself into a proto-American's place. Suppose that you get a B because you suck and you lose your scholarship or it is reduced. Most of them have no means to top up the scholarship and weather the storm so they have to go back which is a stain on the reputation of the family. They will have people talking to their parents "Your precious Shriram is so f*** daft that he got kicked out of University" (name is real by the way). This also stands in the way of their dream to become proto-Americans, get a green card, a passport and remain in the country.
So a eliminating anomalies in the curve by a complaint here or complain there is absolutely not beyond them. I am definitely not surprised if the person who ratted on this student had this in mind (somebody pointed the prof to the group in the first place). In fact I have seen it and been on the receiving side one time too many to the point where I simply said "F*** it, F*** you all, I am leaving".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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.
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!!
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 |
Everyone around me worked their ass off. People grouped together but didnt talk to each other, just wrote things going through equations like lightning.
Me?
I went to his desk grabbed the book he got the questions out of, turned to the answer key and wrote them on the board. Everyone in my class got a B, I got a A
The point? It is silliness boarding on stupidity to think in the 21st century you will not be able to have all means necessary in completely your job. So WHY would you limit yourself when the professor said "use anything possible except talking to each other." The talking to each other was a trick obviously, since by saying that he reinforced the fear all college students have about honor codes and the like, but his point was, dont be stupid about working the problem.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I'm a university professor in the sciences. I encourage students to collaborate on homework. To my way of thinking, one of the purposes of homework is to teach collaborative skills essential to success in science. Scientists talk to each other. A lot. Sharing information and ideas is what science is all about. The question of students simply copying solutions off the internet is a little trickier. I address the issue by expressly allowing use of the net for problem solving, but I require students to cite all sources used in writing their solution. This teaches good scientific practice, and it also removes gray areas where violations are concerned. If you look the answer up in a book or on the web, but don't cite the source, it is academic misconduct, period. This is really not very hard to deal with.
As someone who recently completed an undergrad at Georgia Tech, and having been the head TA for a 1000 student class for six semesters, I have heard enough complaints from students about their fellow students cheating. From my personal experience, Indians have no statistically significant proclivity towards 'ratting others out' that students from other countries. More importantly, educators generally ignore such complaints unless there is a compelling argument. We aren't all that dense and we do realize students often complain about others as a way to get ahead. Others complain due to their perceived disadvantage when students who are socially capable of working together in study groups do better than loners.
While it is possible you got the rough end of the stick, I think it is unlikely. It seems like the professor thought were cheating and because it was Indian students who complained against you, you left the USA and held a grudge against all Indian students from that point on? Is it only me who thinks it is more likely that you changed universities to give your disciplinary record a new start? I do not want to be making accusations and don't take offense to what I said, but this is what it seems like to me (and I am sure to others too). I hope you'll clarify.
I will say that Indian students are, however, more resourceful when it comes to cheating. Being an Indian who proctored tests, I can say that it sometimes takes one to catch one. The incidence of cheating amongst Indian students seems to be higher than students of other nationalities. I know that is racist, but most of the TAs I've worked with tend to agree with this statement.
Cheers!
--
Vig
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I don't think you understand how 'education' works for 99% of the population. For every person who can actually successfully identify a gap in their knowledge AND successfully seek out the appropriate source of information to fill that gap (i.e. the autodidact), there are many, many orders of magnitude more people who need assistance in one or both of those areas.
Schools - university or otherwise - exist to guide students through pathways of learning, ideally providing both opportunities to explore alternate pathways, but also advice and counsel as to how to pick those pathways. It isn't about being the exclusive source of information. Teachers in general exist because our world's cluster-model of exchange of information (e.g. Wikipedia) has been documented to quite undeniably rely on the extremely specialized knowledge of a tiny sub-set of the users. Jimmy Wales noted that 50% of the Wikipedia edits comes from 0.7%, and 72% of the articles were written by 1.8% of the users. Without those super-contributors, the rest of Wikipedia's audience would have nearly nothing. Those super-contributors are 'teachers', just using a different medium.
I honestly don't understand the complaint by the school here, if just because the language quoted in the article doesn't seem to prohibit study groups. However, I wouldn't be comfortable making a judgment until I heard at least a few other key facts, e.g. whether the Prof. had specifically advised students not to collaborate. That said, the University's response is interesting in that it appears to view itself as targeting a source of corrosive behavior in the school.
To clarify: the school (at least as it appears to me) viewed this study group as corroding the learning experience by both encouraging and facilitating cheating of some sort (i.e. sharing of answers, methods, etc.), and the school took action to prevent this damage. From their perspective, cheaters do not merely hurt themselves (by depriving themselves of education) but in fact hurt others (by distorting the curve, distorting the perceived success of the Prof.'s performance, etc.).
"Stumble before you crawl"
You obviously need to get more friends if your study group is that small. When I was in college, the physics study group I was part of met every week and almost every physics major from freshman to senior was there. Not quite 100 but more on the order of 50 people taking over the commons area of one dorm. Unless the prof said not to get help on the assignment, I don't see how a study group either online or in person is cheating.
Regardless of the exam, homework in this case was worth 10% of their final grade. So if you're borderline between pass/fail or A/B, the extra couple percent could make a difference. Never mind the fact that he was enabling freeloaders to just copy the info and turn it in. If I was in the class, I'd be a bit pissed, since by doing the work myself I'd be hurting myself -- or I'd be spending extra time checking my work against those posted answers to ensure that I wasn't on the lower end of the curve.
Collaboration on a smallscale is one thing. Distributing answers is another.
That said, they came down pretty hard -- either they just want to make an example of him, or there is a back story we're not getting. You'd think they would have asked him to remove the group, and maybe failed him so he'd have to retake the class. Maybe he refused, and that's why it was escalated so far? Or maybe he played politics and didn't allow unliked classmates to join the group. Who knows.
One last thought -- the reason I'd be upset as a professor is that the performance of the students reflects on the professor and the school. If the school allows things like this to slide by, they may be diluting the quality of their graduates. Just as when you're in the workforce and need to consider the impact of your actions on your boss and company, so too should students consider the impact of their actions on their professor and school.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/CityandRegion/2008/03/07/4935451-sun.html
I'd say with the CRTC, and UWO, Canada must be doing a lot of things right lately, but there's a section in the linked article about a Ryerson (Toronto) student getting charged with academic misconduct for a group. Although apparently this group asked students to 'Please input your solutions.' So maybe we're getting some things right after all. About time......
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
The point still stands though that the current method universities use for distributing information is perhaps outmoded. You mention the expense of labs - but what about the bulk of university classes which don't require a lab?
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I'm gonna say it... we need a paradigm shift so we can get some synergy up in here. Even without the buzzwords something needs to change, though I'm unsure exactly what.
Don't worry about the mule, just load the wagon.
The article says that he is charged with "running an online study group on Facebook"; if that is true, then by extension Ryerson should outlaw any form of study group, because it's just as easy to share answers when you're meeting with others in the library or talking about it at a party with an upperclassman who took the class three years ago. If they are charging him with "posting answers on Facebook," or even "soliciting answers on Facebook," that would be more understandably punishable.
As a college prof, I can attest to the fact that catching plagiarism is necessary and one of the few crappy aspects of my job. There is a fine line between someone (tutor, friend, Facebook buddy, etc.) helping the student and giving him/her the answers, but the line is there nonetheless. It's impossible and inappropriate to police the students every minute; I've seen other profs burn themselves out with the paranoia that there are cheaters out there and they must catch every last one of them.
The answer, in my mind, is to make the students want to learn the material: make the lectures interesting and informative, show them why the information is important for them to know in the long-term, give tests which require the assimilation of the material and not just memorization of the answers. If a student in my class is cheating, I take some responsibility for it.
And maintaining an active Facebook account doesn't hurt...
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
Man, what a load of horseshit. Did he say in advance he'd be grading based on how well you hacked the instructions? Or did he intentionally mislead the entire class about that? If the point was that in real life you'll have research texts available, wouldn't it be shorter to just *say* that than waste a whole freaking class period on this fraudulent exercise?
That kind of passive-aggressive "gotcha" teaching and grading is truly bullshit. Apparently he's got nothing useful to actually say about the field engineering that day.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
This describes my engineering school experience to the letter (Do I know you?). My group probably started taking all identical classes starting at about the second year and we went all the way through graduate school doing this. We all benefited from the faster learners teaching the slower learners in a small group setting, we did occasionally share answers and study previous year's tests, but that didn't matter when you realize that you won't get very far in engineering without learning the material through and through. If doing this was not allowed, all of us would have not done as well in school, and we all would have learned a lot less. In the end by being in this study group I received an education above and beyond what the school and professors alone could give me. This facebook thing seems like people trolling for answers though, why couldn't they just meet up at the library to study like everybody else?
Sadly, I've actually watched several students program by changing random letters until it magically works. Of course, this deserves a failing mark (for their own protection!) almost as much as plagiarism.
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.
Ryerson has a track record of being very tough on misconduct.
The company I work for has a very specialized engineering software package that we sell to students (with proof of enrollment) at a 99% discount. However, as long as there are universities, there will be software pirates. Some enterprising students decided to install an old version of our software that had been cracked in a university lab. Bad idea. The software tried to call home to register, and failed validation since it was no longer a supported version. Since there are so few users of the software, and I know who every legal user of the software is, I quickly noticed this. I discovered that the IP addresses of the computers trying to register the software were Ryerson lab computers in the school of engineering. After discussing the situation with Ryerson's IT staff, I found out that the students were told that I knew what they did, the school of engineering was notified of what happened, and their department chair was notified about what happened. I was told they all were going to face disciplinary action and that one of them would face expulsion since he committed a crime with university machines. I wasn't going to chase after them legally, I had no desire to; I just didn't want them installing pirated software on university computers. But Ryerson had some of their own punishments that they were going to mete out.
Western also lets undergrads blatantly cheat off each other. I'm a TA for some undergrad courses here and last semester I caught at least 100 copied assignments in what is generally considered a bird course, I flagged them (as instructed), but absolutely nothing happened to these students. No marks were deducted, nothing.
The most I've been able to do about cheating is take off some marks for a lab discussion when some partners had identical lab books because the only part of the lab I could prove was copied was the discussion section (apparently identically wrong math doesn't count as cheating).
I mean, I don't know if cheating is this blatant, but in my undergrad if we were caught cheating on any part of an assignment, we would get 0 on that assignment (or in the course) and a note on the transcript. Granted, we still collaborated, but nobody that I know handed in identical work or just copied from other students like a number of students here are allowed to do.
what's that now?
It also makes me wonder whether this is a 'weeding' course where having too many passing grades would cause the school to have too many sophmores going forward. If they've intentionally over-admitted freshmen in order to filter out the best ones for the sophmore class, having a group that significantly increases the number of passing grades in one of the key killer classes might be a serious administrative problem. Given that a curve could still fail students with numerically high average grades, folks tend to get far more bent out of shape by scaling a %85 to a D- than by scaling a %32 to a B+. A broad based and effective facebook study group could result in far too many numerically passing grades and need to be suppressed...