Coursenote Web Sites: A Frightening Look Into the Minds of College Students Nationwide
by
Laurie Henry
WHO KNOWS WHAT goes on in other people’s classes? At other jobs where there are a whole lot of people in one place doing more
or the less the same thing, it’s not hard to know what everyone’s
up to. On the other hand, teaching generally takes place behind
closed doors. One of my only chances to learn from my peers,
unless I make a point of listening in to office-hour conferences,
comes at the end of each semester, when I wait in the hallway
for my students to fill out their course evaluation forms. It’s always interesting to listen to other teachers in their classrooms. Who is the math professor who’s so intriguing about differential equations? Who is the composition teacher who asks a question,waits a minute, and then answers it herself? Why aren’t they doing their course evaluations too? Admittedly it’s a haphazard way of picking up teaching tips.
Fortunately, I can now access free Web sites and read through the notesthat undergraduates at over a hundred colleges and universities have taken in their classes and posted on-line for the aid of their absent classmates. These notes can bring me closer
to knowing how students perceive what goes on in class — and
how the students’ perceptions don’t necessarily match my own.
Two sites that provide course notes from college classes all over
the country are www.StudentU.com and www.Study24-7.com.
A third site, www.collegeclub.com, has recently stopped advertising class notes on its Web site, although it continues to offer ratings of individual courses throughout the country (“Give out the scoop on your teachers and classes”) and a clickable link to “over 20,000 high quality essays on line.”
So far, StudentU.com’s class notes are more comprehensive and
by far easier to navigate through than Study24-7.com’s. Neither
of the sites is as comprehensive as all that, however; a student
would be lucky to find relevant notes, at any school, on either site. Both sites are actively looking for more note-takers, though. StudentU.com’s note-takers are supposed to have a 3.5 GPA and to provide a page and a half of typed pages per class, and many do write almost that much.
Still, only a very weak student would believe the on-line notes could possibly replace the activities of the actual class. The danger
is that it would be just those students — the least prepared ones — who might be especially tempted to replace class notes for attendance. “My guess is that someone who would copy notes on-line wouldn’t be someone who’s doing terribly well in the class,” David Weinberg, associate professor of economics at Xavier University, says. He can see that, theoretically, a student could learn quite a bit of material without ever attending a class by keeping up with the notes; frequent quizzes make it unlikely that such a student could pass the course by reading notes alone, however. Weinberg’s main concern about on-line notes would be that the notes be “if not of the highest quality, at least of reasonable quality.”
And quality control is a big problem for the on-line sites. StudentU.com offers readers the chance to rate the quality of what they access, but all notes on the site either have four or five
stars or are “not yet rated.” This site also offers solid-looking study guides in fields including political science, macroeconomics, marketing, management, and chemistry, although of course better ones are easily available off-line. StudentU.com also provides plot summaries of about forty works of literature. They’re quirkily chosen — Siddhartha, The Pearl, To Kill a Mockingbird — books
more often taught in high school than in college. Collegeclub.com’s
“Novel Notes” page is better, with plot summaries and analyses, commissioned from graduate students, for about 90 often-taught novels and plays.
Students in my English composition classes often take no notes, or
else they write down my offhand remarks furiously, so I was
particularly curious about the notes StudentU.com provides for WR 121 at Oregon State. Here, I’m reminded that concepts I find completely clear are often less so to some students. The note-taker’s observations include: “Be sure your paper is sepeartly [sic] argued and then tied together” and “Construct one page of notes discussing your notes or prefferably [sic] your rough draft/outline for first paper.” It’s hard to believe this writer has a 3.5 GPA.
Other student note-takers also seem not to be taking their note-taking assignments very seriously, and it’s understandable why StudentU.com’s advertised pay rate for notes has gone from $400 per semester-long course a few months ago to $300 today. Notes for a session of Auburn University’s English 221 begin: “The Bennets have a miserable because their marriage is unequal in social classes and temperments.” The entire Pride and Prejudice
class, indeed, is summarized in a paragraph. The reviewer for a session of Language of Film at Texas A&M reports that The English Patient was directed by “Anthony Manghella,” offers a cogent definition of “dissolve,” and then notes that “nothing else of importance was discussed” in the rest of the class.
Most note-takers must clean up their notes between the time they
take them and the time they e-mail them to their employers. Since most students probably never copy over the notes they take in class, it’s particularly interesting to look at the on-line notes of those note-takers who also seem not to. The first five lines of notes from the Marist college student who submitted her notes from English 353, a class on Italian-American literature, to Study24-7.com, look like poetry: letters, articles, ect. = first works = diary kept journals when they came to America impact and association with new environment came in steerage or recruited to paint 1st writings dealt with differences and hardships
That’s about half of the notes for the day, and though I’ve never
had a class in Italian-American literature, I can’t say I learned anything from the site that I couldn’t already have guessed. My first thought was to question what has been going on in the class; then I find myself wondering what it is that leads students to make the notes that they do, rather than other, more interesting notes. Are some of my students, in fact, taking notes as ineffectively as the on-line note-takers, writing down details they already know and letting the more difficult, less familiar material fly over their heads?
Another 24-7 note-taker, one of the more conscientious ones despite her pen-name of bigbrowneyes80, writes, for English 226-06 at the University of Alabama, five summarizing paragraphs of Mary Astell’s “Some Reflections on Marriage” that could have been reduced to a single sentence: In the 18th century women made more effort to attract men than men made to attract women. Either this class is awfully low on content, or the student is not taking notes effectively. Do students in literature classes tend not to make notes, I wonder, because note-taking is unnecessary, or do they take no notes because they take notes so badly that their notes are useless to them later? Do students whose classes are mostly lecture courses learn through experience to be better note-takers than English majors?
Of course, some class notes on both sites are insightful and
entertaining in a positive way, notably those at StudentU.com for a course on Gender and Popular Culture at UC-Irvine, and French African Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The quality of the notes in business, the sciences, and the social sciences is in general higher than those in the humanities.
Still, it’s hard to understand why a reasonable student who cared
enough about missing a class to try to find out what had happened
during it wouldn’t simply ask another student for her notes, make a point of attending tutoring sessions, or drop by the professor’s office hours. Workbooks and study guides far more comprehensive than the on-line class notes are easy to find for language and science students, and for the absent literature student, there’s always Cliff’s Notes.
Not all students are reasonable, however, and it’s possible that
the class notes sites may help some students — perhaps people with a desire to avoid human contact — somewhere to learn some of the material. Until the sites become far more comprehensive
and the note-takers more sophisticated, however, the course note sites are probably more useful to instructors looking for feedback than to students. And it’s always possible that someone I know will someday be reviewed on Collegeclub.com’s Rate-the-Teacher page.
