Currently, I am taking a computer science course, and people browse their social media accounts on the school desktops while the professor is lecturing.
SparkNotes is one of many examples that prove that college was more serious before computers were everywhere. In almost every class, I notice at least one student desperately scrolling through Twitter or Instagram, like a deprived addict. Your writing, trigonometry, and poetry classes may not seem relative now, but you will find uses for every single one of them in the future, whether you use them to teach your future children, to think in more abstract ways, or use practical skills in your profession, will all depend on the path you pave for yourself.
If for some reason, you struggle with reading comprehension or time management, try some other tactics. Audiobooks are available for almost all popular books; that way you can listen to your assigned reading in the car or while relaxing. There is no excuse for using SparkNotes or an equivalent, unless you have already read the assigned reading, and you are refreshing yourself on particular plot points. And truthfully, your classmates and professors can tell if you have actually read, based on how simplistic or complex your comments during class discussions.
This article was not an attack on SparkNotes and websites like it, because there were resources like it before the Internet was as popular as it is now. Instead, it was meant to call out students who cheat on their assignments and consistently take the easy way out. Often, I have seen students letting their personal and academic lives intermingle, which can create poor grades and lax effort.
Challenge yourself to do the maximum instead of the minimum; not only will you feel a newfound sense of pride in yourself, but your professors will also see the sudden improvement, and your grades will most likely rise.
In , four Harvard graduates founded an online dating service called The Spark. The founders soon realized they could better monetize the student traffic to their site by leveraging their credibility as formerly successful students. SparkNotes publishes free chapter-by-chapter summaries and reasonably intelligent analyses of hundreds of books, including all the classics taught in high school English.
Reliable stats are hard to come by, but one survey , conducted by the Vacaville Reporter in Solano County, California, found that Though no one would admit it on the record, all the high school graduates I polled—all friends and acquaintances who, understandably, asked to remain anonymous—said they had used SparkNotes in high school, either in addition to or instead of reading the text.
I was very busy in high school. My high school blocked SparkNotes' website on school computers, but that doesn't do much to deter students, who can access the site on smartphones, tablets, or at home.
Students can use Sparknotes to become familiar with a work before reading it and receive some background information. Many students have found that reading the Sparknotes for a class has prepared them sufficiently to take a test or write a paper on the subject of the reading.
Many teachers adjust their prompts or test questions so they can be assured that students can not pass the test by solely reading online summaries. Many high school English teachers have found that their students have been turning in papers that do not seem to be original.
Teachers often catch students using these sites because the student will not properly cite information in their pages. It is important for teachers to emphasize to students that not all websites are accurate. When using websites or wikis, students should make sure that the site was created by a reliable source.
Teachers could also endorses using databases such as EBSCOhost to find scholarly articles when researching certian topics. If a student is caught plagiarizing a schoool assignment, teachers often give the student no credit for the assignment.
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