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Facebook Users Get Lower Grades In College
Hugh Pickens writes "According to a survey of college students Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users. The study by Aryn Karpinski, an education researcher at Ohio State University, found that Facebook user GPAs are in the 3.0 to 3.5 range on average, compared to 3.5 to 4.0 for non-users and that Facebook users also studied anywhere from one to five hours per week, compared to non-users who studied 11 to 15 or more hours per week. Karpinski emphasized that correlation does not equal causation and that the grades association could be caused by something else. 'I'm just saying that there's some kind of relationship there, and there's many third variables that need to be studied.' One hypothesis is that students who spend more time enjoying themselves rather than studying might tend to latch onto the nearest distraction, such as Facebook or that students who use the social networking site might also spend more time on other non-studying activities such as sports or music. 'It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.' As for herself, Karpinski said she doesn't have a Facebook account, although the co-author of the study does. 'For me, I think Facebook is a huge distraction.'"
People without social lives don't use social networks.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It's not that hard, 1 A and 1 B is a 3.5 right there. Heck an A and a C is a 3.0. Most companies these days have a 3.0 minimum before they'll even look at your Resume/CV.
Maybe smart kids are less likely to be social and have friends so they aren't on Facebook? Why isn't the causation/correlation defined that way?
And maybe whoever wrote the comment above should have
(1) learned that writing part of your post in the subject field makes it hard to read and is therefore stupid; and
(2) RTFA. Hell, RTFS, where it's made clear that they've considered that.
"Who is a non-user?" Facebook has become a very common thing. How big is the sample set of non-users compared to users? Is there any relevant personality trends that run through those who refuse to use Facebook?
With the proliferation of online degrees and most people moving their social interaction to social networking sites, college may soon be an extension of Facebook. 50 years from now Facebook University may be the most prestigious college in the United States. I don't know if I'm being funny or insightful, but all of a sudden I feel depressed.
Well, first off, it's Ohio State.
:).
Second, this sounds like the kind of "study" done for a sociology class. Plenty of inflated grades among people who take Soc 101.
Third, it was a survey. It'd be interesting to see if there's a correlation between not using Facebook and lying about your GPA
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The author didn't say that facebook causes lower grades, they said facebook users have lower grades.
Read the following (from the summary!) closely:
'I'm just saying that there's some kind of relationship there, and there's many third variables that need to be studied.' One hypothesis is that students who spend more time enjoying themselves rather than studying might tend to latch onto the nearest distraction, such as Facebook or that students who use the social networking site might also spend more time on other non-studying activities such as sports or music. 'It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades. But perhaps the lower GPAs could actually be because students are spending too much time socializing online.'
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
To me, this is the same question as "Does marijuana make you unmotivated, or are unmotivated people more likely to enjoy marijuana?" This is based on the unproven assumption that people who smoke marijuana tend to be unmotivated.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I managed to kill a LOT of time during my first shot at college in the early 90's playing Super Tecmo Bowl, practicing for the dorms' Street Fighter 2 tournament, and hanging out on BBS's (I had one of three computers in the 150 room dorm). Had the intertubes and Facebook been around at the time I'd have been killing time on there. When it came down to it I was just unprepared for college so after getting kicked out at the end of my second year, I took a year off to work and learn how much minimum wage sucks, then went back for a second attempt with a better perspective and had no problem buckling down.
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
Pity the study did not compare the grades of students who used other social network sites. It might possibly be that Facebook attracted people of lower learning ability than some other sites did. Studying those relationships could be interesting.
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'It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades.'
That fits my experience as a parent exactly. I've found that if you deny your children access to one distraction, they will just find another.
Maybe smart kids are less likely to be social and have friends so they aren't on Facebook?
Why do you necessarily correlate being social and having friends with being on Facebook? I am not on Facebook and don't feel any loss because I see most of my friends in person, for example at salsa and tango classes or at the weekly pub quiz a few of us attend, or at parties. Oh, and I have a PhD in Computer Science, and got the a first class honours undergraduate degree, which is roughly equivalent to a 3.5 - 4.0 GPA in the US system. When I was an undergraduate, I was involved in several student societies (I was on the executive committees for three of them, including being president of two), and didn't use any of the social networks that were popular back then.
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Maybe it's a semantics thing... if the courses are too easy, they result in inflated grades. That's what grade inflation is.
In my experience, any 100 or 200 level class was easy, unless it was picked to be a "weeder" class (like organic chem). Then it was still easy, but required some effort.
I found that soc 101 & 102 were a joke, but maybe it's because writing is easy for me. Maybe those classes just played to my strengths.
Once I hit the 300s and 400s, classes were a bit harder (especially classes with instructors to whom English was brand new [pharmacokinetics especially])... but on a lark, I took some English lit 300-level classes, and they were jokes too.
some programs really are easier than others, and result in grade inflation.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
More details on the study are available in this news item from OSU.
Many variables are not considered directly in the analysis (at least in the brief writeup). For example, the sample has more grad students than undergrads, and grad students were found to be less likely to use Facebook. But grad students are selected from academic high(er) achievers, and graduate courses are generally graded with a higher curve than undergrad courses. That alone could explain the correlation. So why do less grad students use Facebook? Perhaps age plays a role (since not so long ago, Facebook was targeted only at undergrads). Similar arguments could be made regarding STEM students, who are more likely to use Facebook, but (I suspect) are also more likely to have lower undergrad GPAs. It is very difficult to compare GPAs across disciplines without controlling for the mean GPA.
The average person using facebook is the average person commenting on youtube videos: incredibly stupid. Facebook does nothing better than any other method of communication, and you have to use a shitty interface and tolerate facebook users to do..what?
If you want asynchronous communication you can use any IM software out there, emails, forums, etc.
It's not true, though. Facebook is not as easy as email, IM, forums, etc. Everyone I know is on Facebook and all I need to remember to get in touch with them is their name.
I don't need lists of emails that are constantly needing updates; I don't need IM contact lists that are usually out of date as well; I don't need memberships at several forums and to remember who belongs to each.. just type a few letters of their name on Facebook and there they are. Persists through email changes, phone number changes, and all that.
Yeah, my good buddies who I hang out with every day I just phone. Everyone else I get on Facebook.
I'm not one of those fools who posts fifty thousand pictures of every stupid event that occurs in their lives. It's a communication tool and little more.
That mindset of "the average person who uses some trendy service I reject because I'm trendily un-trendy is stupid" really gets to me. I've never understood why techies find it cool to be arrogant and condescending.
Hell...when it came time to study, even housecleaning seemed a better alternative at times.
So the worst students have the cleanest desks because they procrastinate by cleaning up.
At least that's in a nutshell the story I tell my boss every time he complains about my cluttered desk and 'til someone gives me a better reason not to clean up I'll stick with it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Most companies these days have a 3.0 minimum before they'll even look at your Resume/CV."
I personally hate this by the way. People who mostly took the advanced and hard classes available, get punished for our GPA, while others who do the bare requirements and then take "Art Appreciation" and "Dance interpritation" and the like get huge GPA boosts...
Seriously, I had several classmates who had C's in all their math and science classes, but take lots of the easy classes to get a 3.2 GPA.
It wouldn't bother me so much if the interviewer would *Look* at what classes we took so that they can say "You took 50% non-major, non-minor related classes to boost your GPA, and did terrible in your actual Major". Most of the time, they just reject based on the GPA and thats it.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
I have a PhD in Computer Science
I'm going to make a reasonable guess that you took >= 5 years for the PhD. (If you finished in less, please don't be insulted.) This puts you graduating at Spring 2004 or Winter 2003 at the latest.
When I was an undergraduate, I [...] didn't use any of the social networks that were popular back then.
What popular social networks are you talking about? It certainly wasn't facebook.
Yes, yes, I'm aware that Ohio State has a lot to offer, sorry if I stepped on your precious buckeye-loving toes.
But, it IS a huge state university with an abundance of liberal arts majors who take fluff courses[1], same as at any big state university (as a graduate of Rutgers, I know the drill). OSU has some very good graduate programs, and some very good undergraduate programs.
[1] Not to say that there aren't liberal arts majors who take hard courses, and get a good education there... but plenty of OSU graduates might as well have gone to a diploma mill.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If those GPAs are on a four-point scale, the main thing this study tells me is that college is too easy.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
You've confused correlation with causation. The latter is where A has a causal relationship on B, the former just means that A and B follow the same trend (and is what this researcher claims to have documented).
For me, it's not about a "trendy service that I reject because I'm trendily un-trendy". A stupid idea is stupid whether it's trendy or not, and a good idea is good whether it's trendy or not. And in my opinion, sites that ONLY do social networking are stupid. (I also think Twitter - the great trend of the past month - is stupid.) Slashdot's friends/foes system is an awesome addition to this site - but none of us are on this site for the social networking aspect of it; we're all here because we want "news for nerds" and any social networking that happens is a bonus.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
Dude... this is slashdot. Having a three-digit Facebook userID is like having 666 tattooed on your forehead, except less cool among the Satanist and counterculturalists.
I'm no real oldtimer (chips & dips was before my time), but sheesh... don't brag about a three-digit Facebook ID on slashdot lest ye wake the low UID slashdot dragons.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
And in my opinion, sites that ONLY do social networking are stupid.
Maybe you just have no social life ;-)
Or, much more likely, maybe you don't organise yours the way I organise mine. Probably the same thing was said when telephones meant people stopped writing paper invitations.
I don't use Facebook very often -- I'll log in at most once a week to see if anything catches my eye. Most useful is the "Events" part. A friend living 200 miles away invited me to her housewarming party last week. Without Facebook, I'd have just gone on the train. On the Facebook event page, I could quickly see someone else's comment of "I'm travelling from X, and will drive anyone living nearby if they pay for some of the fuel". Excellent.
In a few weeks time, someone I know might start organising picnics in a nearby large park. About 10 of his friends (including me) will go, and we'll invite a load of like-minded people. Maybe 50 people will turn up. Of course, I could do that with email, or text message, or by phone, or face to face, but it's easy to click 15 names in a list and press "Invite". Of course I can mention it in conversation too, and then refer people to Facebook, where they can find the date, time, location, and any last-minute alterations.
I occasionally go to meetings organised by a local Humanist society. They have a Facebook group, so I get invites/reminders through that.
This could be done with a mailing list, but that means someone has to pay for it, or deal with spam, or managing subscribers. As it's on Facebook there aren't any of these problems, and with the Facebook calendar app the event appears in my Google Calendar.
I would go further and suggest this relationship is utterly trivial. Wow, students with more time on their hands spend more time on Facebook. You would likely find a similar correlation between students who have lower grades and who spend less time studying and the number of movies students watch. They just plain have more time to do other stuff if they are not studying.
Currently hooked on AMP
That brings up a good point. Even though the survey may not be totally scientific, I can definitely see a negative correlation between any outside activity and grades. Anything like Myspace, Facebook, World of Warcraft, or any time-wasting activity robs study time.
However, here's a thought. Current coursework focuses on constant cycles of memorization and testing in most fields. Is that really relevant anymore given the supposed "new world of work" we're about to enter? When I studied chemistry many moons ago, most of the non-lab coursework could only be aced if you studied relatively hard. Has that changed, given the fact that:
So, how much of this is Facebook and how much is just the changing college demographic? Should we change the coursework offered in schools?
To be fair, my opinion is that we should definitely not be forcing everyone through college. Previously, we had a good mix of job opportunities for different education levels, and everything worked out. Only people who were smart enough went to college, and it wasn't an admission ticket for entry-level work like it is today. The crass way to say this is "the world needs ditch-diggers too" but it's true. Having a mix of jobs for a mix of skill levels definitely makes society better.
You say that I have no basis, but that's just, like, your opinion, man. Where's your research?!
This is a fucking Internet message board, not a scholarly journal. It is perfectly appropriate for me to propose the possibility of a correlation between these various factors. Further, any reasonable person would come to the correct conclusion that by "probably" I mean that I don't, in fact, have research to back up my statement, but that I would expect such research to do so.
I'd be fascinated as to why this use of language in this context is so surprising, and apparently upsetting, to you.
You just couldn't be more wrong. Please consult a dictionary. A correlation exists if two things are statistically related. Often they both proceed from a common cause. But even if no causal mechanism can be identified, a correlation is nothing more or less than a statistical relationship.
Here's a fine example. The Redskins predict election results. No one sensible would suggest there is any causal relationship here. But there is a highly improbable statistical relationship. Which is to say a clear correlation. (And it is not only likely, but necessary that if you start arbitrarily comparing big lists of measurements there will be uncanny correlations, which are absolutely meaningless.)
Before you criticize others you should really check your facts, and consider twice if the other person's position is reasonable.
-Peter
Any asshole can get a 3.5 GPA nowadays, it is built into people choosing some schools over others
Or having old exams/hws/etc and professors too lazy to change anything or write good exams. One guy quipped that he's seen the class avg. go up 20 points since the iphone was invented. The guys with high GPAs worry me more than the ones without 'cause at least the low ones pretty much guarantee that the guy learned something more than how to memorize/copy a solution.
open source modern art: laser taggi
It's not a mess. It's my stack based chronological filing system.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I had the opposite experience. In honors/harder classes, there was the expectation that you were smart. In normal classes, they expected you to be stupid. So the worst grade you could really get in an honors class was a C and you had to try to do that bad. The worst you could do in a non-honors class is an F. So it was really easy not to try and get A's and B's in honor classes. The normal classes actually graded you harder.
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There's nothing sadder when the kids you fuckin tutored get 'honors' while you have no such distinction, because you challenged yourself every step of the way.
There should be weight given to grades based on the level of the courses.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
One of the best suggestions I've heard was switching to a GPT (grade point total) instead of a GPA, which punishes you for pushing yourself and taking extra classes. Still doesn't solve the problem of accounting for taking the harder classes, though.