Overexposed pranks, bad results

Unhappy students have been pulling nasty things on teachers as long as there has been school. Now, on the very public participatory Web, these actions can cause more trouble than intended for all parties concerned! Case in point: Apparently in a project about viral marketing, a marketing professor at Virginia Commonwealth University "gave his class an assignment to make his 6-year-old pug [Oscar] famous," the Associated Press reports. Most of the students "posted fliers around campus with the pooch's picture on them," but one student reportedly posted a threat on his MySpace page that he would kill Oscar – even though the assignment said students couldn't harm or kill the dog or threaten to do so. The effect was that "animal activists and others around the globe" called the university and police to report the threat. "After investigating, Richmond police issued an alert saying, 'this threat is the result of a VCU student's assignment that went awry. We want to stress that at no time was any animal in danger'." Charges won't be filed, the AP added, but the university said the student might "receive sanctions, including expulsion," because he violated "VCU's honor code and rules regarding the use of university computers."