Digital Worlds and Academic Misconduct

I've been watching the case of a Ryerson University student who was accused of cheating for running a study group on Facebook. That student has been handed a harsh punishment, but not as severe as could have been the case.

My initial reaction was that Ryerson faculty had overreacted to the situation, after all students share notes all the time - it's a time honored tradition in university, and it can be a valuable way for students to learn from each other.

Then I started to think about it by reflecting on my own experience in University, and life since then.

I didn't do the "study group" thing much in University. I used to see people huddled around the table in the undergrad workroom, trying to come up with solutions to assignments, but for the most part, I preferred to solve things my own way - regardless of what "the herd" was doing. It made little sense to me to try and process other people's misunderstandings of the material - my own were confusing enough.

Today, I understand better the value that others get out of the collaboration process and how it plays into their learning styles.

However, there's quite a difference between a bunch of people whacking things around at a table and a Facebook page or other online facility.

Where the verbal exchange of ideas and understanding at a table is constructive at a certain level, it also requires each individual to actively process the information they are receiving - and make their own notes on the matter, the online experience does not require the same level of critical thought - and many will simply cut-and-paste the posted answer without actually bothering to understand it. (I know I've done similar things).

The second point I'd like to put forth is an observation from a series of experiments I did at work a few years ago. I was seeking feedback on a software design I was working on, but it was complex enough that the formal design document could easily "gloss over" things and they would be missed.

So, I published three versions of the design and distributed them randomly around my department. The first version had copies of hand sketches inserted into it where visual aids were needed; the second used simple line art (a la what the MS Office "drawing" capability can produce) and the third had very polished diagrams produced in Visio.

What I found is this:

a) The people who received the hand-sketch diagrams felt the most freedom to critique the design, and I got some wonderfully creative feedback from that stream.

b) The people who reviewed the "line art" version were somewhat less critical in their analysis, and missed several key design flaws that I knew were present. {but hadn't entirely solved at that point}

c) Those who received the most polished diagrams gave me very little feedback.

When I started polling my reviewers, what I found is that the "more polished" something looked, the less willing people were to criticize it. In essence, fewer people were willing to examine carefully the more polished looking works.

So, turning back to the use of environments like Facebook, I find myself wondering if this isn't closer to the "buy-a-paper" ghost writing services of the 1990s than it is to the study room experience. People posting "their solutions" will be putting up material that will appear to be complete - even if it is deeply wrong. The ability to simply cut-and-paste that material means that there is no action required to transcribe it that really involves the mind.

Digital representations tend to look finished, and people are less willing to criticize something that looks complete. At this point, we don't have a digital equivalent to pen-and-paper freehand (at least not that's terribly useful). Consequently, the kind of critical thought and analysis that university assignments should be provoking is actually much harder to do in a digital forum, and I would argue that it would be a small minority that would actively use the online forum appropriately.

I'm not saying that study groups in these environments cannot work, but rather that the student using such tools has a personal obligation NOT to simply cut-and-paste results into their own works. The reason is simple enough - University exists as a vehicle to teach people to think for themselves. Using "cut-and-paste" from your web browser is short changing the learning experience in so many dimensions, and the person who is short changed is not the instructor, but the student who doesn't do their own work.

In the Ryerson case, we also have to respect the fact that the instructor specifically asked for independent work to be done by the students. If the students were sharing solutions via Facebook, they were arguably not fulfilling the instructors directions for that assignment, and thus not achieving the learning objectives that underly those directions.