By Megan

For all you college students – note taking is a part of being in school. Aside from the few who are blessed with photographic memory, most of you will agree that taking good lecture and study notes is a big part of what earns A’s and B’s instead of D’s and F’s. Taking notes can be a huge pain, but a well-done set of notes is valuable, and now may be even more so, thanks to the internet. Websites are now popping up that offer a resource for students to go to and download class notes that others have added, and reward students who upload high-quality, helpful notes cash or other prizes. As if you didn’t have enough reasons to pay attention in class, money adds a whole new incentive to jotting down some notes.

GradeGuru.com is one such note-sharing service that lets students download notes for free if they have a university-affiliated e-mail address. Students who submit notes (which can be in a variety of forms, such as outlines or textbook and lecture summaries) then get rewarded depending on the quality of the notes and on the number of hits and downloads their notes receive. GradeGuru operates on a point system, where users earn a certain number points for every set of notes they upload, as well as whenever their notes are downloaded by others.

You might think there could be many loopholes to a website like this, but GradeGuru has a very strict anti-plagiarism and “no cheating” policy. All notes are submitted to TurnItIn, which is a database that notes and other written items are checked against to ensure the content is original. Any questionable material can also be flagged by the users themselves with a “report disrespect” button, which helps to prevent any unethical activity.

Bottom line, make sure any notes you choose to submit are truly your own. More and more professors are copywriting their own lecture notes, so don’t think you can make a quick buck just by throwing whatever outlines you received in class on the site – it could get you in some messy legal trouble.

While there are concerns that websites such as GradeGuru actually take away from learning because they allow students to get notes without having to master the note-taking process, I think that students can still benefit greatly from a service like this. It allows students to actually listen to a lecture and absorb it without having to keep up with scribbling down messy notes, and then go back and access them later.

The biggest issue right now with a site like GradeGuru is that not all schools are involved, so it can be difficult to find (and draw hits from) notes for a very specific class. If your school doesn’t have much activity on the website, don’t fear – you can still post and use notes in more general subject areas, on anything from business to earth science.

As with many of our ideas, GradeGuru isn’t a way to get rich, but if you already take high-quality notes, publishing them for others to download could get you some extra spending cash – the top earner on GradeGuru has made over $400, not too shabby. There are other similar note-sharing sites out there as well, such as StudyBlue, which doesn’t pay you to post notes, but does pay you for any referrals you get to sign up for the site. Check it out!

Photo Credit: HometownSolutions