Facebook Isn’t A Grade Killer After All

All the ranting and raving last spring about how Facebook was causing the GPA’s of college students to fall may have been for naught. In April, Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University, presented the results of a study they did, about how Facebook was affecting the grades of college students who were users. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association last April in San Diego. After surveying 219 undergrads and grad students, the authors of the study said they found that the GPAs of Facebook users was a full point lower than those of non-users; 3.0-3.5 for users vs. 3.5 to 4.0 for non social networkers.  Although Karpinski said in a Time Magazine piece, that the study didn’t suggest Facebook directly causes lower grades, just that there was “some relationship between the two factors. “Maybe Facebook users are prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators,” she told the magazine.

But now a new study done by student researchers in a marketing course at the University of New Hampshire found “no correlation between the amount of time students spend using social media and their grades.” The researchers surveyed more than 1,100 students at the school about their use of social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. Light users were those who spent less than 31 minutes a day on the sites; heavy users spent more than an hour daily on them. The results? 63 percent of heavy users earned high grades, A’s and B’s, and 65 percent of light users earned high grades.

These results match findings from a recent Northwestern University study that surveyed 1,000 undergrads from the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. The research showed no significant negative relationship between grades and the use of Facebook.

Chuck Martin, the professor who led the class that conducted the study, was quoted on eCampus News saying, “The study indicates that social media is being integrated with, rather than interfering with, students’ academic lives.” Martin said it could be that students just dip in and dip out, using sites like Facebook for just a few minutes at a time. “It’s become a part of their lives,” said Martin, “ as opposed to living in a virtual world.”