Hamberites on SparkNotes: Helpful Study Tool or Cheating?
Photo Credit: Serena Wang
There are many reasons why a student may choose to use SparkNotes, or similar websites, to aid them in their English classes. After all, websites like these can provide students with almost any information, including summaries and analyses, for almost any piece of literature. But how much information can you take from SparkNotes before it is considered cheating?
“I think it depends on how you use it,” said Justin Taliman (10). “If you directly copy off their analyses, then it's basically cheating because you're just taking their ideas and putting it onto your paper.”
Taliman thinks that using a summary on SparkNotes can help to refresh a student’s memory and remind them of what happened in the story, but if a student uses the ideas from the online analyses, then they never learn how to think of their own ideas.
“Using SparkNotes is kind of a grey area because you need to know when to tell if you’re cheating or not. You need to try not to take their ideas,” he said.
Eleanor Uy (9) considers SparkNotes to be a helpful tool when used correctly. “You come up with your own ideas, but you look at the summary. If you plagiarize, then that's bad. But if you don't, then that's fine. Use it as a resource,” she said. “As long as you don’t just read the [summary on] SparkNotes.”
Ms. M. Poon (English) said that SparkNotes should be used as a way to check a student’s understanding of the assigned reading. However, she mentions that students must be mindful of the authors of such websites.
“[Sparknotes] should never, ever be a replacement for reading the actual novel [or] play. But sometimes people want to check that they’ve understood the novel or the play in the right way,” she said. “[But] you have to think too. Who's writing these things? Who is actually producing the SparkNotes interpretations? Are they qualified? [...] And the thing too is what they give you may be true, but it may be only to a certain extent.”
“You might go like, oh, I'm never going to read a book again. Well, what about the articles that you're supposed to understand? [The] technical things that you're supposed to know in your job? [...] We're using this as a way to develop those things. So if you go straight to SparkNotes, you don't think,” Ms. Poon noted. “In the future, you’ll be reading stuff that there are no SparkNotes for, and you [wouldn’t have] helped yourself.”
Mr. D. Mugford (English) explained that he thinks SparkNotes could be used as a secondary source for pieces of writing.
“If you pass off the information that you get from those secondary sources as your own information, then that is clearly academic dishonesty. [...] If you write an essay about something [...] and then you're like, I wouldn't mind just seeing what other people think about it to compare with my idea, that's an acceptable use. Or, [...] you can always quote or cite the source. Then you're never in trouble,” he said. “If [students] pass it off as their own work, then I have a real problem with that. If [...] they’ve been taught to responsibly use it, I think that's a little bit different.”
Mr. Mugford noted that students, now more than ever, want to do well in their classes, which is why they may resort to SparkNotes.
“Maybe in some ways teachers need to back off about the premium put on getting high marks, and just let it be about the learning,” he admitted. “If we didn’t sell this message that higher marks means you’re going to be more successful in life, I think that there would actually be better forms of learning going on.”