Negative GPAs?

Okay, so to continue my last blog post, which I ended talking about Facebook and how it affects school work… I found a couple studies done back in 2009 talking about these effects.  The first was done in Australia and is here… 

Some things that they say:

“Researchers from the US have found that students prone to accumulating friends, uploading photographs, chatting and "poking" others on Facebook may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.”

I asked my roommate if she agreed with this and she nodded her head and told me that in college she’s spent more time on Facebook than anything else.  I can back this up; my three roommates and I can be all sitting in our living room and all of us should be working on homework but instead we’ll all be on Facebook, AND not talking aloud to one and other but all talking on Facebook chat. Or one of us will go to the library to have silence so we can concentrate on homework, and then we end up just talking to each other on Facebook again. So there’s no point in even going to the library.

“They found that 68 per cent of students who used Facebook had a significantly lower grade-point average than those who did not use the site.”

I would agree with this as well.  If you think back to before you had a Facebook, I know for me, we all spent more time on homework, because if you sat down to work on homework at the computer, you would do it, you wouldn’t go sit on Facebook and rot your brain for hours on end.

Another article I read is a response to the “Growing up Wireless…” article I talked about in my last post.  This one invites readers to post and talk about what they have to say about how technology is affecting their lives.

“I think technology can impact a students grades really well. Technology such as texting takes your mind off of school work, and have a side conversation going. Everyone would rather text, than do homework. However technology has also gave us plenty of good tools to retain information. Its how we use technology is the advantages and disadvantages.”

I think that’s an important thing to note; there are advantages and disadvantages to technology.  I wouldn’t be able to be making this blog on all of this if we didn’t have the internet and the capabilities for blogging.  However some blogs can waste the blogger’s time and his/her grades can drop because of obsessive blogging.

“I think my habits are somewhat affecting my grade, but not to severely. I do take longer doing homework because I get distracted, so homework that would take 1 hour might take 3, but other than that it doesn’t affect me that much.”

This post seems like it came right out of my own mouth. Wow. So true.

Anyways, although I’ve kind of beaten around the bush, I’ve found that GPAs are being affected negatively by all this technology. I concentrated mainly on Facebook in this post, but that’s because it’s mainly what distracts me.  I know students also get distracted by many other means of technology such as video games, computer games, texting, etc also distract some students.  Studies found that in the past decade, GPAs in college have dropped 1.3% and while that isn’t something that’s noticeable, it’s a definite change because of our technological era.