At the beginning of every semester, college students struggle to buy their textbooks, and then throughout the semester, they struggle to look for ways to avoid reading them. Reading through an assigned book, no matter it is purely scientific or literary, turns out to be an unpleasant experience for many students. In order to pass a quiz or enable themselves to discuss a work they haven’t read, students usually request the help from others. In the past, the resource students can utilize limits to their professors, supplementary books from libraries, or their classmates. Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, students are spoiled for choice. Websites like SparkNotes, GradeSaver, and Shmoop now offer detailed analysis and test preparation covering almost all subjects. While some people argue that this open access to technology proves to be a positive supplement to learning for many students, many professionals publicly express their suspicion of college students’ ability to draw the line between studying and cheating.
Among all these controversial websites, SparkNotes is the most frequent target of debate. SparkNotes, advertised as “today’s most popular study guide”, is famous for its comprehensive plot overview, character list, analysis of major characters, themes and motifs regarding to a book or play. It also includes important quotes, key facts, study questions and essay topics. One of the most distinct features of SparkNotes is its “No Fear Shakespeare” section. The website shows actual text from any work of Shakespeare, nest to the modern day translation of the text. No matter whether SparkNotes’ initial intention was to create a “cheating” website or “study guide” website, it has become many students’ magic key to skip over their assigned reading and open the door to the typical high school essay assignment which often involves symbolism or themes in the literature. Naturally, such abuse of online resource brings controversy and cry for death of original thoughts. However, the fact is, no one can forbid students to use the sites. They are everywhere. Most of the “study guides” are available as e-books for electronic reader, or downloaded to their cellphones. The trend that more and more students use online textual analysis to achieve better academic scores is unavoidable.
To be honest, I used SparkNotes for many times in high school. For an assigned book, I would read through the original text, as well as the textual analysis on SparkNotes. Usually, I would try to apply my own thoughts to homework or in-class discussion, but when it comes to formal quiz or test, it was the time for me to “incorporate” the opinions and words from SparkNotes into my own answer. Even though it was not plagiarism, sometimes I felt a little guilty to steal ideas from online resource. But such sense of guilt faded after I received a satisfying grade. After all, the interpretation from SparkNotes did stimulate my though and deepen my insight toward a book, at the same time, improve my grades. I didn’t realize many implications and symbolizations until SparkNotes told me. Carl Fisher, chairman of the comparative world literature and classics department at California State University, also recognized that students’ loss of original thoughts is inevitable. “I make my students submit their papers through turnitin.com,” which is a plagiarism search engine, “if students don’t offer some original thinking, at least they offer some original writing.”
We cannot blame teachers’ distrust on students’ ability to draw the line between learning and cheating because the line itself is too ambiguous. Take me as the example. I never memorized the textual analysis on SparkNotes word by word and used it as mine own, but I did steal many ideas from the website. I tried to provide both my own understanding and SparkNotes’ interpretation at the same time during a test, but I never cited the reference to the website on my test paper. Will you call it a proper employment of online resource, or cheating? Moreover, there are some online tools make this issue more complicated. As I know, many college students use a website called thesaurus.com when they write an essay. To avoid too many “ordinary” words in their essays, they just need to type the word into the website and find a more rarely-used word among its synonyms, in other words, the SAT word. Is it a proper way for students to polish their essays, or is it just another way of cheating? For now, there is no many things teachers or parents can do. We can only hope that students may find their own way to accommodate today’s overload of information and make responsible choices to utilize the information given.
This is a very good essay. I liked that you tackled this issue because some see Sparknotes as cheating while others see it as an amazing study guide. The truth is that it probably somewhere in between, which is what you seem to allude to in your paper. You might have a stronger more argumentative paper if you choose a side (whether it is cheating or studying) and then argue it.
Ying, I really like your essay and all through high school it was a heated debate as to whether or not spark notes was allowed. In fact, my english teacher would make reading quizzes over parts spark notes specifically didn’t cover to see if we read the actual text. I think your thesis is clear and straight forward. My biggest problem is how many grammatical and spelling errors there are because it becomes distracting. Also maybe more examples of how using spark notes is cheating may provide more support for your essay. Good job!
Ying, you present a lot of relevant facts and ideas in your argument. I, too, have used sparknotes as a means of obtaining important themes and symbols from a text; however, your thesis isn’t necessarily made clear until much too late in the essay. Perhaps you could expand on your introductory paragraph to include an explicit thesis about the thin line of cheating and simply using the information given to students via the Internet. I thought you did a great job writing this essay, though, and I was pleased to see you use your own personal experience as an example.
I liked this essay a lot because sparknotes is very relevant to students. I think that this essay takes a bit of a different route than your claim and argues that sparknotes limits original thought rather than the line between cheating and learning. It could also be interesting to argue how if you don’t use sparknotes you could often be at a disadvantage to students who do use it.