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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."
Yes. It is cheating. No one ever gets help from anyone in the real world, and certainly not when science is involved.
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!
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/
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
(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.
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!!
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.
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 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
H.e ac_tua,lly cop-ie_d t-he sp_ell-ing fr>om som-ew>here elure he c,hanges thi[ngs a b-it so that it's not pla-gi[arism.
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?
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 recognize that writing style...
Stop e-mailing me! My penis is big enough!!!!!
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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.