A Professor Reviews CliffsNotes and Other Cheat Sheets - The New York Times - 0 views
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At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them
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What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.
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“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.
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Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.
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CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.
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In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.
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CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.
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Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”