The Impact of Discord in Schools

As we all know, social media has become a part of everyone's daily lives. Especially young kids, teens and adults. The list goes on. Social media applications are great for staying in touch with each other and reaching out to someone within seconds. 

During the peak of the pandemic in 2020, Discord and Zoom became an essential tool in academic and work environments. These applications allowed us to stay in touch with our instructors, coworkers, peers and loved ones since physical contact was a major risk back then. 

However, aside from all these wonderful pros, there are also cons involved when it comes to Academic Integrity and the usage of social platforms. 

Many of us attended school virtually which limited parental and teacher supervision. 

This allowed several students to message each other through their student portals in order to move onto a different platform where superior authority was basically nonexistent. Platforms such as Discord and Snapchat, just to name a few of the most popular social media apps. They did this in order to create group chats with their peers which allowed them to vent or help each other with the course, homework and classwork. Sometimes even to chat with each other during class since many students never had their cameras on. 

In most cases, many students took advantage of the worldwide circumstances and decided to cheat with classmates during quizzes and exams. This violates many school's and university's academic honesty policies since it contributes to plagiarism cheating and much more! Many institutions decided to take matters into their own hands when stumbling upon these situations. They conducted many investigations to identify students who contributed to these dishonest actions. 

I was aware of all these situations simply because my school's Office of Student Conduct and Ethical Development team sent out an email mid-pandemic to our entire Campus Community addressing these issues. 

Below I have attached a screenshot of the email they sent us at that time, which was around May 2021.