A couple of weeks ago there was minor epidemic of news about a report out of Ohio State University claiming that students who used Facebook get lower grades. Even the earliest reporting of this story drew skeptical comments (here is one from April 15 in the Ohio State U’s student newspaper). OK, so students would always be skeptical about anti-student news; but on April 21, the Wall Street Journal expressed its skepticism too. No matter; it was the story a lot of people wanted to hear, and it spread faster than the Swine Flu. Another reason to fear and hate the Internet.

Now Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern U and the Berkman Center, working together with two colleagues, has re-done the study with a large database of students and found … no relation at all between Facebook use and grades. Or maybe a small POSITIVE correlation.

Bet this story won’t go viral.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Social computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.