70 at UT in trouble over app they used
About 70 students at the University of Texas at Austin are facing either automatic failing grades or expulsion for being members of a group message board where information about an upcoming test was posted.
In a Sept. 20 email headed “A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day for many of you,” John Kappelman, a professor in UT’s anthropology department, accused over half the students in his introductory anthropology class of cheating after he learned of the group chat’s existence, something he said in the email was explicitly prohibited at the start of the semester.
“The rules of the class are clear: students are not permitted to ask about, discuss, or share information related to the exams or labs,” Kappelman said in the email.
One student, who asked to remain anonymous because of an on
going investigation into her case, said she broke down crying in class when she received the email.
Around the time of the Anthropology course’s second exam earlier this month, she said a student had posted in the GroupMe asking what might be on the test. Another student responded with a list of all the textbook concepts the class had reviewed up to the exam, she said. A few hours later, she received Kappelman’s email.
Kappelman declined to comment, citing the ongoing university investigation. Sara Kennedy, a spokeswoman for UT’s Office of the Dean of Students, said in an email the accused students will be reviewed on a caseby-case basis in the coming weeks to determine if they will indeed receive the recommended failing grade or other disciplinary action.
Students in the class had communicated via GroupMe, a popular text messaging app, especially in college classes. This is not the first time using the app has landed students in hot water. In 2017, Ohio State University accused 83 students of “unauthorized collaboration” via GroupMe.
Denné Reed, an anthropology professor at UT, teaches the honors version of Introduction to Biological Anthropology or ANT301. He said Kappelman’s course differs from the traditional lecture course, where most students take the exam all together on a certain date.
Reed said students in Kappelman’s course could hypothetically take an exam Monday and have knowledge of the exam’s content before another student takes it on Tuesday, leaving room for potential academic dishonesty if students are communicating in GroupMe about what to expect.
“I can see how that’s problematic,” Reed said. “Academic integrity has been an ongoing concern, especially in these larger introductory classes.”
Though Reed and Kappelman teach similar courses, Reed said flexible departmental standards mean his own syllabus does not include a ban on GroupMe or other group discussions, as long as test questions and answers are not shared.
According to Kappelman’s course syllabus, students are banned from discussing the content of exams and labs in “all possible venues.” The syllabus’ examples of these venues include websites, forums, Facebook and informal hallway chats.
Kappelman teaches a web-based class, which is conducted primarily online and is largely self-paced.
Screenshots of Kappelman’s email quickly went viral on social media, garnering outrage from users who said the students who had not posted anything in the GroupMe thread were being unfairly punished, especially those who had the chat muted and any notifications turned off.
The student said the GroupMe link had been sent out publicly at the start of the semester and neither the course’s teaching assistants nor Kappelman had commented on it.
The message thread mostly advised the class how to navigate tricky links to assignments and how people’s semesters were going, the student said. She said she used it to organize study groups, while other students recommended good study spots around campus.
“Especially as freshmen, we didn’t know to steer clear of that sort of thing,” she said. “It seemed like everyone, all classes, had these. I thought to myself I might as well join, and most people in it had innocent intentions.”