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Student Not Expelled For Facebook Study Group (Follow-Up)

by Will Safer on March 19, 2008 at 06:30 PM

facebookThe student at Toronto's Ryerson University who -- when we last checked -- was facing expulsion for creating an online collaborative study group on Facebook, has now been cleared of academic misconduct -- although he still received a penalty to his course grade.

Chris Avenir, the 18-year-old student who created the Facebook group, claimed the activity on the online study group was the same as students meeting in person to work on coursework and advice.

Their professor, however, had stipulated that specific parts of homework assignments be completed individually. He accused Avenir of 146 counts of academic misconduct: one for creating the Facebook group and then one for each student who eventually joined.

After an engineering faculty committee review, Avenir was cleared of the 146 infractions but was still punished with a failing grade on the specific homework assignment, which was worth 10 percent of his final grade. Not enough to cause him to fail but still a major drag on his overall performance. He will also attend a workshop on academic misconduct.

Reports of Avenir's predicament drew considerable interest on blogs across the Web, including many comments from Switched.com's readers.

One comment from Switched reader "De" reads: "I don't see it as being any different than the use of [a] Blackboard. As long as it cannot be accessed during an actual test, meaning that cell phones and text messaging should be off, then it isn't cheating."

But not everyone sided with the student. Another Switched reader who identified himself as "VJCMAJD" wrote: "If you can't ultimately complete the work on your own and think for yourself, you fail. Losers rely on others to get the job done."

From AOL News/AOL Money & Finance.

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Tags: canada, expulsion, facebook, professor, ryerson, student, study group, StudyGroup

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