I’m probably in the minority here, but I actually get pretty excited when I go to english class after a particularly interesting reading assignment, because I want to discuss the night’s reading with my fellow students. However, more often than not, when I ask my classmates about their thoughts on something we were assigned to read, the response is “sorry, I haven’t read it.” Sometimes my classmates intend to get to it later, but in far too many cases, the reason they haven’t read the assigned chapters is because they decided to read an online summary instead, usually Sparknotes or Shmoop. Finding that so many of my peers were using online summaries was frustrating, but it left me wondering: just how common is the use of online summaries at McClatchy?
To answer this question, The Prospector polled 161 students (41 freshmen, 47 sophomores, 43 Juniors, and 30 seniors), and asked them whether they actually read the books they were assigned for English, or just used online summaries. Interestingly, the majority of students said they both read books and used summaries: 26 freshmen, 19 sophomores, 23 Juniors, and 18 Seniors. That’s a total of 86 students, more than half of all students polled. I had personally expected the majority of students to depend entirely on web summaries, especially since so many people seem to value fast information rather than in-depth information. I was relieved to find that most students do at least some reading, as it gave me some hope that our society still values literature.
Of the remaining 75 students, 30 (9 freshmen, 8 sophomores, 7 juniors, and 6 seniors) said they only read books, while another 30 (5 freshmen, 11 sophomores, 10 juniors, and 4 seniors) said they used just online summaries. The remaining 15 (1 freshman, 9 sophomores, 3 juniors, and 2 seniors) said they neither read books nor used online summaries.
English teachers are not opposed to students using online summaries as a way to increase their understanding of complex books. However, they draw the line at ignoring books entirely in favor of the summary. Mrs. Archuleta, an English teacher, wrote a warning on her whiteboard instructing her students that using online summaries for homework assignments would result in a grade of zero. When asked to comment, she said summaries are “fine to use as a supplement for something you don’t understand, but not as an alternative for reading.”
Mr. Maxwell, also an English teacher, had similar thoughts on the matter: “It should never be used as a substitute, but I encourage using it as a study guide.”
Several students do use Sparknotes and sites like it as a supplement, as teachers recommend. Kalena Inouye, a Senior, said that Sparknotes is “good for going in depth with things I don’t understand.”
Still, many students use online summaries improperly, as an alternative to actually doing assigned reading: “It’s funny when teachers say “don’t use Sparknotes, it won’t work, and then I use Sparknotes and it works,” said Cameron Miller, a Senior.
Some students haven’t even heard of Sparknotes. When asked for his thoughts on Sparknotes, John Martinez, a Senior, replied “What’s that?” After we explained that it was an online summary site, he said “Dude, that’s cool. That’s a resource.”
I personally have never used Sparknotes before, but I agree with the English teachers that it, and other summary sites can, when used properly, can be beneficial to students. Used as a supplement with reading, summary sites can allow us to clarify things in a book that we don’t understand. However, using it as a replacement for reading not only makes you less likely to do well on English assignments, but it essentially defeats the purpose of English class in the first place. The point of taking English is to develop reading skills and to analyze literature, and using online summaries to skip reading does neither of these things. While summaries can give you background information and plot details, they can’t give you insights into the themes and tone of different parts of a novel in quite the same way as actual reading can.
