There is some good news for students who miss a few classes every now and then or have a hard time staying focused during lectures.

GradeGuru, a new Web site created by McGraw Hill Education, offers incentives such as money and gift cards to students who upload their class notes online and allow classmates to download and freely use the notes at no charge.

“The idea for GradeGuru grew out of extensive ethnographic research with hundreds of college students into how they study, what they believe works and what motivates them,” Emily Sawtell, founder of the Web site, said. “We observed that students commonly turn to their peers for help and that peer collaboration was already a constructive practice amongst students when they were struggling to understand difficult concepts, or even just wanting to practice and improve. However, until GradeGuru, there was no way for students to consistently access the help of the academic leaders in their classes.”

Georgetown students have already contributed a total of 69 documents to the Web site. The basic idea is that students upload notes – admissions information, advice, assignments, how-to guides, study guides, essay outlines, presentations and much more – in exchange for up to $50 per document uploaded. The dilemma for many students, however, is how this type of service could affect the quality of classes and student work.

“Class should be such that you shouldn’t be able to get its essence out of notes,” Elena Lien (COL ’12) said. “You can use the notes as a resource but not as the sole reference point for the class. I wouldn’t use the Web site because the point of notes for me is that I take them.”

According to Sawtell, the Web site was developed to help struggling students to succeed while giving recognition to students who are already excelling. She stated that GradeGuru is a tool she wished she had access to as a student at Harvard Business School to foster greater collaboration among classmates.

“GradeGuru is committed to optimizing the way college students learn by developing a collective knowledge platform. Our mission is to help students leverage the power of collaborative intelligence to achieve academic excellence and success,” Sawtell said. “There are students in classes everywhere struggling to understand difficult concepts, not sure where to start or how to improve their approach to preparing for their assessments to be more successful. GradeGuru gives those students a way to find out how the really successful students do it.”

Tristan Mabry, professor in the Department of Government, stated that the Web site serving as a method of collaboration may limit a student’s potential.

“The notes are only as good as the student who writes them, so a buyer is at risk of rising only to the level of some other student, though even this outcome assumes the buyer and seller are equally competent, which is never a safe assumption,” Mabry said.

Furthermore, Mabry stated that GradeGuru is not a new concept, as the idea of paying another student for his or her work has always existed. In this case, however, it is the technology which has made the exchange almost effortless.

Some students expressed concern about the quality of a class that can be summed up in a simple set of notes and about the attendance of students if that class notes are available online. However, Sawtell said she is not concerned about this Web site actually affecting student attendance at lectures and in classes.

“Notes sharing is not going to change behaviors and mean less students go to class,” Sawtell said. “Not bothering going to class and just relying on someone else’s lecture notes was unfortunately happening well before GradeGuru. In fact, many lecturers now give all their notes as handouts on the course platform anyway. The value of GradeGuru is not just in getting lecture notes, the value is in seeing [how] someone else interpreted the lecture and if their understanding was different to yours.”

Adhip Chaudhuri, professor in the Department of Economics, stated that especially in courses such as economics, mathematics or science, solely relying on notes will not lead to improved learning.

“If you are just looking at graphs on a PowerPoint presentation, learning is very passive. I think that students will be very unpleasantly surprised when they realize that they don’t know what goes on the horizontal axis [of a graph],” Chaudhuri said. “I think that active learning is very important, and that notes alone aren’t sufficient.”

Some students have grappled with the ethical concerns of students being paid for uploading notes from a class.

“I don’t know if the student should make money off of notes you take in classes because as a student you’re supposed to take notes; it’s expected of you to show up to class and I don’t think students should profit,” Shelly Zhao (SFS ’09) said. “Also, for some professors, there may be a question of whether you need to get the professor’s consent because they have their own original ideas. A professor is not necessarily repeating what the textbook says; he analyzes it. I’m fine with sharing notes with people in the same class but if you’re selling your notes online, you’re crossing the line.”

According to Mabry, while the Web site is a facilitator of plagiarism, a student’s choice to buy notes or essays and use them in an unethical manner is ultimately his or her own.

” . The problem here is a moral hazard, i.e. a system that promotes bad behavior. Obviously, getting access to a completed essay invites plagiarism, though it is still up to the buyer (student) to plagiarize or not,” Mabry said in an e-mail.

Sawtell, however, assured students and faculty alike that GradeGuru is committed to maintaining standards of academic honesty.

“GradeGuru is about collaboration, not collusion. It is about getting ideas and building students’ confidence, not about offering easy answers,” Sawtell said. “As you will see right up front on the site and in our community standards, we do not tolerate plagiarism of materials on our site.”

Additionally, Sawtell spoke of a new partnership with a new anti-plagiarism tool provider that will help solidify GradeGuru’s stance against plagiarism. The GradeGuru team will also be closely monitoring materials to screen for copyright violations. She added that students should feel safe uploading their documents on the Web site.

“By putting their content on GradeGuru – given this new partnership we will be establishing – students can be more confident that they can help their peers without their work `appearing’ in someone else’s assessment,” Sawtell said. “There will unfortunately always be a minority of students who try to game the education system and cheat themselves out of a valuable education. With our strong stance against plagiarism and the tools to back up our position, we think GradeGuru will be in a strong position to deter unethical practices.”

Though Georgetown students only began uploading documents last summer, GradeGuru has been in operation for about a year. Other top contributors to the Web site include Duke University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale.

Sawtell and other developers of the site plan to offer a $1,500 scholarship this semester, the GradeGuru Grant for Academic Excellence, to the top contributing student on the site in an effort to reward the most active members and to encourage others to join.

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