Study Buddy

Before a test in his traditions class near the end of the fall
semester, Bradley Brown, a UA freshman majoring in economics, went
online and downloaded a study guide.

He had never used Notehall.com before, but he liked what he saw.

Notehall.com was launched in
September 2008 by Justin Miller, a junior in the Eller College of
Management, and Sean Conway, who graduated from the college in 2007.
The site allows users with a valid university e-mail address to browse
the UA schedule and select their classes; for each class, users can
contact classmates, form study groups and, most importantly, buy or
sell class notes.

While passing notes in class is generally frowned upon, selling them
online is not against UA rules. In fact, the Associated Students of the
University of Arizona, UA’s student government, endorsed Notehall and
formed a partnership between the service and the university.

Brown thinks the partnership and the business is a great idea and
says buying someone else’s study guide isn’t unethical; rather, it’s
logical.

“Especially for people like me,” he says, “who are trying to study
for five classes, with the time it takes to make a study guide, let
alone study, you can go to Notehall and find someone who’s already made
a study guide. I don’t see that as cheating in any way. … You’re just
studying.”

With finals looming heavy on the minds of nearly 10,000
Notehall-subscribing UA students this week, Notehall.com is poised to do some serious
business. It works like this: Students download notes in just about any
format (.doc, .pdf, .ppt etc.). Lecture notes cost 25 credits (roughly
60 cents). Considering that to get those notes, some poor sap had to
stay awake through 90 minutes of a PowerPoint presentation in a
cramped, 300-person lecture hall, it’s not a bad deal.

However, the diligent note-taker in the front row may not be a poor
sap after all. Each time someone downloads notes, money goes into the
note-taker’s account. Study guides are especially profitable, paying
out $1 per download. Reading notes and lecture notes pay 25 to 50 cents
per download—numbers that can add up.

Top sellers, the Web site brags, have earned more than $500 per
semester—not bad if you’re a compulsive note-taker.

Mikaela Hudson is proud of her copious notes. She’s a senior in
business marketing and management, and was the vice president of the
Eller Board of Honor and Integrity last semester when she received an
e-mail from Notehall.com. Selling
her notes and study guides sounded like easy money, and Hudson was
intrigued.

But after thinking about the work she puts into each document (a
study guide can take her 10 hours to research and write), she decided
they were priceless.

“I don’t feel like Notehall is cheating by any means,” she says. “I
just feel like it’s helping lazy people get the same grade as you, and
that’s not fair.”

Hudson says that neither she nor any of her six roommates use the
site, but she knows many students do.

“In a perfect world, it would be a supplement,” she says. “… But
in actuality, that’s not what it is. It’s a way to stay home and not go
to class.”

Paul Melendez, the director of the undergraduate ethics and honors
programs at Eller, was one of the first to bring ethical considerations
to light, posting his concerns as a comment on the Arizona Daily
Wildcat Web site.

His main problem isn’t with students buying and selling notes, he
says; there’s no stopping that. His concerns involved whether students
have a legal right to profit from notes taken from a professor’s
lecture, and the fact that some students can’t afford to buy the
notes.

After contacting Conway and Miller, Melendez got on board as sort of
an unofficial ethical adviser to Notehall; he says the two are doing
all they can to make sure the site is ethical, including giving him
administrative access to the site to check for documents that might
mean trouble. A few papers he flagged from his business-ethics
class—exact copies of test essay questions—were taken off
the site.

Notehall isn’t a new idea, he says, just a new medium. Karl Eller,
the famed entrepreneur for whom the Eller College of Management is
named, engaged in note-taking for profit, Melendez says while pulling a
copy of Eller’s Integrity Is All You’ve Got from his office
shelf.

While sitting next to a meticulous note-taker in class, Eller had an
idea, and proposed a deal: He would handwrite her notes onto yellow
sheets of carbon paper and sell them, and they could split the
profit.

Business was slow until the professor announced that anyone caught
with the yellow notes would be dropped from the class. Within days,
Eller sold out of copies.

The founders say they hadn’t heard the story until after starting
Notehall, but the idea is the same—providing a useful, ethical
service and making a buck.

“We’re not a cheating resource,” Miller says. “You know, we’re not
the site that has test answers; we don’t have tests; we don’t have
solutions … And once people start to understand that, they really
value what we’re creating, which is a supplemental, dynamic learning
environment.”

There’s a need for this kind of material, they say, because everyone
learns differently.

Conway, for instance, has attention deficit hyperactive disorder,
and says he can’t listen to a lecture and take notes at the same time.
The two figured there were a lot of students like Conway—people
who go to class but would rather listen to the professor than scramble
to take notes.

They were right. Since it went live less than a year ago, Notehall
has expanded to 11,500 registered users and four universities: Arizona
State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of
Kansas, with more schools signing on in the fall.

“I think it’s the most logical, ethical thing,” Brown says. “It’s
just putting technology to its use. … I think more people should use
it.”

This article appears in May 7-13, 2009.