If surfing the web increases workplace productivity, what does spending time on Facebook do to college students? According to a study by Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein, college students who use Facebook have lower GPA’s and devote less time to studying than other students. While the study didn’t prove causality — do low-GPA, anti-study students self-select into Facebook? — could this be early evidence of a Facebook Brain Drain? [%comments]
Your Brain on Facebook
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It simply means the value of grades has fallen to a level that can’t compete with something as silly as facebook.
Facebook is just another excuse for students who don’t want to study. What would be interesting to see:
What differences in content on their facebook profiles exist between students with higher GPA relative to students with lower GPA? Seems to me you might find some intriguing differences. Facebook can be a great way for normal people to keep track of their friends, but it can also be a great way for web trolls and lazy people to burn hours and hours of time fiddling around on their own and their friends profiles.
I’ve become a pretty heavy facebook user this semester, so we’ll see how that plays out in my grades, I suppose.
Then again with grade inflation, I doubt it’ll be too much of an issue. My master’s program has no incentive to damage its PhD acceptance stats by being hard on students.
I agree with JeremyN. Those who are easily distracted will always find something to be distracted with, Facebook or not.
I got a Facebook account the middle of my junior year of college, and my average GPA my last two years was much higher than during my first two years. I obviously don’t think my higher GPA was because I was on Facebook, but rather due to more maturity and better study skills. But my Facebook account clearly didn’t harm my GPA.
Ars Technica did a good debunking of the media hype on this here: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/04/social-media-slammed-by-science-reporting-not-science.ars
Suffice it to say that the study shows a correlation, but no definitive causation, and it was a small sample. Both this and the “Twitter makes you immoral” story (where the original study didn’t even mention Twitter specifically) were the result of bad science reporting that can often come out before actual experts can get at the original study.
Do people who comment on blogs tend not to read the blog postings carefully? It’s a short paragraph ending with the line:
“While the study didn’t prove causality – do low-GPA, anti-study students self-select into Facebook?”
Please stop twittering on about how you disagree with the post or the study because correlation does not imply causality.
Man, I must be grumpy today otherwise I wouldn’t be posting, I’d just complain to my co-workers who are all checking their facebook accounts.
Uh, surely it’s occured to folks that the a lot of the student getting the highest grades are either too busy to be socially active looking at pictures of their drunk friends at the party they weren’t able to attend since they were studying (aka premed) or are in that group of intellegent students who really aren’t that socially integrated with a normal crowd and weren’t invited to said party (aka engineers- and I am an electrical engineer).
I know a guy who just graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering who doesn’t have a Facebook account. His reason runs somewhere along the lines of “if we were really friends, we wouldn’t need facebook.” He wasn’t nerdy at all, pretty chill.