New Web site offers services to boost GPA

Author: Cloe Shasha

Started in 2006 by two college students from the University of Wisconsin Madison, the Web site www.theclassconnection.com now serves over 600 colleges and 350 high schools across the country. The mission of the website is directly stated: the creators want to help students get better grades.

"If you use the site's free online study tools for a semester and you fail to boost your grade point average, the company will give you $1,000 in private tutoring," the web site promises.

Site members can enter their class notes into their website accounts in order to create virtual flashcards. They can then test themselves with these flashcards on exam material. The Web site will remind students to study more or less depending on their self-administered practice results.

Students taking a class in a specific subject can learn by networking and borrowing notes from any other student member of the Web site who is also taking the same subject at any school. This function allows students to branch out from their colleges and high schools in order to maximize their information sharing potential.

"Middlebury is one of the schools that we are looking to get off the ground this fall and next spring," Chief Communications Officer of theclassconnection.com Ben Jedd said. "We've had nothing but really positive responses from students. We are responding to the fact that education needs to catch up with today's students who are already experts with technological tools like the Internet."

Jedd explained that professors, however, expressed mixed reviews about the Web site. Some professors say that sharing notes is not a good idea for learning.

"Our primary goal is to help students study more efficiently in less time, but we also have a lot of professors who go on the site and use it themselves," Jedd continued. "They find the tools really beneficial for their class instruction."

The Web site provides calendars to help members keep track of their academic obligations. It links to free chapter summaries for more than 100 textbooks and includes a selection of some of America's best students' class notes. Students can also create study groups through the web site.

Dean for Faculty Development and Research and Rehnquist Professor of American History and Culture Jim Ralph is unconvinced about the true benefits of the website for Middlebury's students.

"I'm skeptical because I tend to be skeptical about a lot of technical innovations," Ralph said. "It sounds similar to Cliff Notes. Because a lot of classes at Middlebury are quite specific, I'm not sure how notes from another institution would be helpful for Middlebury students. But that is me speaking as a professor."

Ralph related the Web site's concept to the teaching style of some Middlebury professors who share their PowerPoint slides and notes with their students. While he sees these resources as helpful, he does not believe that this sharing of notes necessarily improves learning.

"Learning is the object here, not memorization," Ralph said. "I'm all for classes that study together and share notes. I think in a face-to-face way - in a group discussion, for example - sharing can be really good for learning. For a smaller school, I'd like to see more of these types of face-to-face interactions rather than clicking on a screen."

Moria Robinson '11 is similarly doubtful about the value of the web site. While she sees that it could bring immediate benefits to students in search of a GPA boost, she does not believe that the web site would provide long-term aid for peoples' abilities to learn.

"The Web site would enable many individuals to get a free ride off the notes of a select few," Robinson said. "So some people would lose motivation to take notes. But note-taking is a study skill that is as valuable as learning the actual material. I don't think this Web site would help us learn things in the long run because once we're outside of college, things aren't always neatly packaged or synthesized from intelligent sources for us to memorize."

Robinson thinks that note taking trains students to prioritize important information and to pay attention to what is in front of them.

Whether or not the web site would prevent students from learning to pay attention in situations beyond the college context, it does promise better grades so that, according to the website, users can eventually perform at an academic level that brings "parents into rant-and-rave mode."