facebook continues to terrorize, or students continue to terrorize using facebook. either one.

[abony holmes]

I’ve been wary of my Facebook account for the last few months, and I’ve made sure my photos and interests are “career-friendly” (i.e. nothing that I wouldn’t  want my mother to see). I’m not alone among the law student crowd — lots of us have done a preliminary Google search and not liked what we saw, and in an effort to change that we've created career-friendly LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to move to the top of the list.

Now there appears to be another social networking worry. An engineering student at Ryerson University is facing expulsion for creating a Facebook group to share study tips. The group, comprised of 147 students, was used to share “tips on homework questions that counted for 10 per cent of their mark.”

Is this a case of an administration being behind the times and misunderstanding the dynamics of social networking sites, or did these students go above and beyond the limitations of traditional study groups? According to the school’s academic misconduct policy, if the group perpetuated “any deliberate activity to gain academic advantage, including actions that have a negative effect on the integrity of the learning environment" it would have crossed the line.

While the size of the group makes the entire enterprise a little fishy, the group’s administrator (and the student facing expulsion) claims the students only shared study tips, and no one ever posted answers to specific questions. However, in a group as large as 147, dishonest activity could easily go unnoticed. What’s worse, the invitation to the Facebook group encouraged members to “use the forms to discuss/post solutions to the chemistry assignments. Please input your solutions if they are not already posted.”