Note-sharing Web site hopes to expand to IU

With student loans and a suffering economy, students are turning to posting their class notes online to make quick cash.

The Web site GradeGuru.com has 322 U.S. colleges enrolled and also receives contributions from colleges in the United Kingdom.

The site, which was launched within the past couple of years, allows students to submit their notes, which they can receive money for through a PayPal account.
IU is one of the universities to which GradeGuru wants to expand its users.

“It’s not so much a substitute for going to class, as there is not really any substitute,” junior Erica DeVasier said. “It’s more of a way to share the notes you took from discussion if you were not clear on the material.”

DeVasier, a frequent user of GradeGuru, has been working for the site for three and a half months as a brand manager.

Her job entails giving presentations in dorms as well as going through notes users upload online and checking for plagiarism, DeVasier said.

Registration to GradeGuru is free. Based on the rating given to a user’s notes, he or she can earn up to 5,000 points for a semester of notes.

The points can be redeemed for $50 or for other programs such as STA Travel and Campus Food, according to the Web site.

Users can search for notes by class number or area of interest.

“GradeGuru really took shape out of extensive ethnographic research we did with hundreds of college students in the U.S. and U.K.,” GradeGuru founder Emily Sawtell said in an e-mail. “We observed that students commonly turn to their peers for help and that peer collaboration was already a constructive practice amongst students.”

The research was conducted by McGraw-Hill, which also provides the money students earn through the Web site, DeVasier said.

“Part of the value of education comes from social interactions on campus with professors and students,” Robert Arnove, the chancellor’s professor emeritus in the School of Education, said.

Although Arnove has been a retired professor for seven years, he said he understands that online note-sharing cannot substitute for the classroom experience.

Sophomore Travis Vaughn, also a GradeGuru brand manager, brings his job into the classroom by working on co-op marketing techniques with professors.

“Some (professors) see it as a collaborative learning opportunity, and some see it as a substitute for class,” Vaughn said. “But a lot are opening up to it.”

GradeGuru is the second business Sawtell has started. A native of Australia, she started school at Purdue University and finished up with an MBA in business from Harvard.

“Education is my passion,” Sawtell said. “I am one of those people who believe education is ‘the answer’ – mostly just for creating sustainable economic growth, but the answer to how to build a more just society, a more socially mobile and cohesive society.”