Facebook cheating scandal nothing new
Students have always shared assignments
Students are accused of cheating all the time. And yet, when you add Facebook to the mix, every newspaper in Canada publishes a story.
Such is the case for newly-minted celebrity Chris Avenir, who is facing expulsion from Ryerson for his role in a Facebook study group. The first-year engineering student is the subject of multiple articles in the Globe, the Post, CBC, the Star, community papers, and student papers from all over North America. For all his headlines, Avenir has attracted a crowd of supporters (fans) who claim sharing answers online is not cheating. They have a website where users can sign a petition and even purchase “Chris Didn’t Cheat” hats and t-shirts.
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What did Avenir do to deserve his fifteen minutes of fame? What almost every student does at some point in their post-secondary career: he discussed and exchanged homework assignments.
But he did it online — on the popular social networking site Facebook, which seems to have a life of its own in the media, fueled by curious grownups who want to understand the online phenomenon.
The National Post made a similarly obvious point in an editorial yesterday: “The Facebook scandal doesn’t really have anything to do with Facebook. An engineering professor at the Toronto school gave his students a specific instruction that their take-home assignments should be done independently. One of those students, Chris Avenir, allegedly ignored the instruction, joined an existing study group devoted to the class, and invited everyone in it to ‘input solutions’ to the assignments so they could be shared.”
It seems to me that this hullabaloo — while no more significant than any other cheating incident — does point to a more important issue when it comes to academic honesty: most students don’t really understand what cheating is. Whether or not Avenir’s supporters are right that this was not a case of cheating, it is painfully clear that there is a disagreement about what is allowed. Call it a failure of the university to inform these first-year students. Call it the inherent laziness of a malignant narcissist, as Heather Mallick so pretentiously called Avenir. But don’t argue that this is some new problem cooked up in the tubes of the internet.
Most of the students I know who got busted for cheating (especially plagiarism) did not cheat knowingly. They didn’t understand how strict the rules were. Or they mistakenly mixed up a direct quote in their notes for their own paraphrase. Or English was their second language and they stole a few too many phrases.
Avenir probably fell into this category. He’s an 18-year-old student in an intensive program who was most likely trying to improve his mark, but not intentionally intellectually shortchange himself. Students share notes and answers all the time and Avenir surely didn’t realize he would be held personally accountable for what 146 of his fellow students also did.
Those who argue that this issue brings up “important questions about the Internet’s role in homework” miss the point. If officials at Ryerson uphold Avenir’s expulsion, they better start expelling many more students. Avenir’s infractions are no different than what has been happening in the halls of universities forever, except that his cheating was publicly documented on Facebook.
Hi Erin,
You’re absolutely right, this is nothing new. However, what this case reveals is just how slack and inefficient universities are at actully punishing the academically dishonest. It can be difficult to catch and teaching assistants and professors don’t often want to go through the hassle of proving someone is a cheater. Paperwork needs to be filed, meetings need to be had, and appeals are often made, causing it to drag on for months. This case is only significant because the legwork often involved in initially catching the cheater was limited because there it was on Facebook. More vigilance in catching others is needed, lest we believe a degree has nothing to do with education.
Perhaps the difficulty in policing academic misconduct is linked to the reason that students don’t really understand it. How do you prove that someone has done something that is vaguely defined?
Take Ryerson’s definition: “Any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the integrity of the learning environment.”
ANY deliberate activity? Would that include studying? Reading extra material? Talking to students who previously passed the course? Drinking yerba mate before an exam?
Well congrats for not being expelled…
I understand the teacher didn’t want kids doing homework assignments together, but I still think that is wrong in itself. Isn’t the purpose of higher education to collaborate and learn? See what happens if you limit the interactivity of peers at a high-level research university…instantly it becomes not to research-oriented or as successful a place to learn as before.
Shouldn’t the teacher be reprimanded for hindering the ability of fertile and free-thinking academic minds to collaborate and learn and progress the ways in which they best see fit?
Tell the world what you think…you know where I stand.
http://www.ChrisDidntCheat.com
I think that the Post had the right idea. That it was online was immaterial, the real question was whether or not sharing answers (if this did in fact occur) and collaborating on assignments violated the Ryerson code.
Erin: I’m actually quite surprised that Ryerson would define misconduct so poorly. I thought most schools had tightened up their definitions.
While the sentence Erin cited is indeed found on Ryerson`s academic misconduct page, it is merely the introductory sentence to a section that goes to describe what constitutes academic dishonesty including several examples including: “working collaboratively on an assignment, and then submitting it as if it was created solely by you.“ This example very clearly applies to this case.
http://www.ryerson.ca/academicintegrity/code.html
It seems to me that two quite separate issues are being intermingled in this situation. In the first case,an assignment given simply as home work or home study for the purpose of student self-help to solidify learning or in preparation for further study, may and perhaps should be done collaboratively with fellow students. The learning process is thereby enhanced and, if you like, the weaker academic benefits from the stronger. All benefit from the interaction. In the second case, however, the home assignment is given as a means to assess the level of learning attained by the individual student. A student who seeks the help of others to complete this type of assigment/test is both deluding herself and simultaneously “cheating” in that she presents a collaborative effort as her own work.
Whether that collaboration takes place online or in the coffee shop is not relevant to the discussion.
Chris didn’t screw up by cheating. He screwed up by cheating in public. Universities know that most of their students cheat, which is why they go ballistic when anything goes public.