Less phone usage for higher academic success

By Steffanie Martinez |Staff Writer|

Would you put your cellphone down if by doing so you could potentially improve your GPA?

As college students, it seems impossible for us to go throughout the day without checking our phones multiple times.

I’ve seen it in all my classes; the students who sit in the back pretending to look at the professor, meanwhile they expertly text, or surf through their Instagram feeds without getting caught.

Richard Murphy and Louis-Phillipe Beland, two economics professors at Louisiana State University, measured the impact of mobile phones on student performance.

They surveyed 91 schools in four English cities before and after strict cellphone policies were implemented.

“We found the impact of banning phones for these students equivalent to an additional hour a week in school, or to increasing the school year by five days,” said Murphy.

According to the results, low achieving students benefited most from the cellphone bans.
Their test scores increased by 14.23 percent.

It’s an issue that dates all the way back to grade school, hiding our cellphones from our teacher thinking we’re fooling them by putting it on our lap.

Back then, teachers would simply confiscate our devices. Now as adults, the consequences aren’t as effective due to potential disputes.

Most classes I’ve had clearly state on the syllabus that cellphone use is not allowed during class time.

However, there’s always that handful that don’t seem to care.

Many students text without consequences even after some professors threaten to confiscate phones if they saw them being used during class.

Maybe they are unaware that cellphones are actively being utilized.

Or maybe the consequence of them confiscating the student’s cellphone would become a bigger issue.

It seems like an innocent, bad habit, but cellphone use is a behavioral addiction with consequences.

Becoming dependent of this device not only affects your personal life, but it can also be detrimental to your academic career.

A recent study done at Longwood University found significantly lower test scores for those who used their cellphones.

“The overall trend was that when cellphone use is higher, test scores are lower, for everybody, within each period before a test,” said Dr. Chris Bjornsen, a psychology professor who studied the relation between in-class cellphone use and academic performance in all of his classes during an entire academic year.

There are clear benefits to not using your cellphones in class.

While professors could easily come up with solutions to keep their students from getting distracted by their cellphones, I personally don’t think it is their responsibility to do so.

Take into consideration the fact that you’re paying thousands of dollars a quarter to learn the information they are teaching you, yet you choose to ignore them by paying attention elsewhere.

You are potentially throwing all that money down the drain while also missing out on information that could benefit you in more ways than just academically.

As college students, we should know better than to disrespect our professors by using our cellphones during their class.

You wouldn’t play with your phone during a meeting with your boss, so why should your professors be treated any differently?