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.\u00a0 Reading through an assigned book, no matter it is purely scientific or literary, turns out to be an unpleasant experience for many students.\u00a0 In order to pass a quiz or enable themselves to discuss a work they haven\u2019t read, students usually request the help from others.\u00a0 In the past, the resource students can utilize limits to their professors, supplementary books from libraries, or their classmates.\u00a0 Nowadays, thanks to the Internet, students are spoiled for choice.\u00a0 Websites like SparkNotes, GradeSaver, and Shmoop now offer detailed analysis and test preparation covering almost all subjects.\u00a0 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\u2019 ability to draw the line between studying and cheating.<\/p>\n
Among all these controversial websites, SparkNotes is the most frequent target of debate.\u00a0\u00a0 SparkNotes, advertised as \u201ctoday\u2019s most popular study guide\u201d, is famous for its comprehensive plot overview, character list, analysis of major characters, themes and motifs regarding to a book or play.\u00a0 It also includes important quotes, key facts, study questions and essay topics.\u00a0 One of the most distinct features of SparkNotes is its \u201cNo Fear Shakespeare\u201d section.\u00a0 The website shows actual text from any work of Shakespeare, nest to the modern day translation of the text.\u00a0 No matter whether SparkNotes\u2019 initial intention was to create a \u201ccheating\u201d website or \u201cstudy guide\u201d website, it has become many students\u2019 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.\u00a0 Naturally, such abuse of online resource brings controversy and cry for death of original thoughts.\u00a0 However, the fact is, no one can forbid students to use the sites.\u00a0 They are everywhere.\u00a0 Most of the \u201cstudy guides\u201d are available as e-books for electronic reader, or downloaded to their cellphones.\u00a0 The trend that more and more students use online textual analysis to achieve better academic scores is unavoidable.<\/p>\n
To be honest, I used SparkNotes for many times in high school.\u00a0 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 \u201cincorporate\u201d the opinions and words from SparkNotes into my own answer.\u00a0 Even though it was not plagiarism, sometimes I felt a little guilty to steal ideas from online resource.\u00a0 But such sense of guilt faded after I received a satisfying grade.\u00a0 After all, the interpretation from SparkNotes did stimulate my though and deepen my insight toward a book, at the same time, improve my grades.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t realize many implications and symbolizations until SparkNotes told me.\u00a0 Carl Fisher, chairman of the comparative world literature and classics department at California State University, also recognized that students\u2019 loss of original thoughts is inevitable.\u00a0 \u201cI make my students submit their papers through turnitin.com,\u201d which is a plagiarism search engine, \u201cif students don\u2019t offer some original thinking, at least they offer some original writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
We cannot blame teachers\u2019 distrust on students\u2019 ability to draw the line between learning and cheating because the line itself is too ambiguous.\u00a0 Take me as the example.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I tried to provide both my own understanding and SparkNotes\u2019 interpretation at the same time during a test, but I never cited the reference to the website on my test paper.\u00a0 Will you call it a proper employment of online resource, or cheating?\u00a0 Moreover, there are some online tools make this issue more complicated.\u00a0 As I know, many college students use a website called thesaurus.com when they write an essay.\u00a0 To avoid too many \u201cordinary\u201d 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.\u00a0 Is it a proper way for students to polish their essays, or is it just another way of cheating?\u00a0 For now, there is no many things teachers or parents can do.\u00a0 We can only hope that students may find their own way to accommodate today\u2019s overload of information and make responsible choices to utilize the information given.<\/p>\n
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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.\u00a0 Reading through an assigned book, no matter it is purely scientific or … Continue reading