Note Service Scores Well on Campus

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — Late sleeper? Miss that 8 o’clock economics class again? Did the dog really eat the organic chemistry notes?

For more than a decade, Penn State University students have survived nightmarish calamities with the help of Nittany Notes, a business that hires students to take notes for more than 250 classes.

The sheets of salvation sell for as little as $2.50 a day.

It’s legal. It’s prosperous. And now it could be coming to a university near you. Owner Tom Matis, who already has helped start franchises on nine university campuses, wants to put his licensing operation into full gear. He’ll consider placing a franchise at any school with more than 15,000 students--his break-even number.

“When I first got into this business, I thought it would be an interesting side thing,” said Matis, a registered investment advisor. “But now the business is really taking off.”

During finals week this spring, students snapped up more than 3,000 packs of notes. Few minced words when asked why they stood in long lines and paid up to $29 for a semester of notes: They overslept, they were hung over, they skipped class.

Their reasoning left many educators in a lecturing mood.

“To me, this is a dehumanizing aspect of education,” said John W. Wulff, a professor of education at Salisbury State in Maryland. “There’s more to education than just assimilation of knowledge.”

The criticism is nothing new for Matis, a tidy, even-speaking man. He has weathered an exhaustive review by the Penn State Faculty Senate and countless affronts by teachers who accuse him of corrupting their classrooms and siphoning students from lecture halls.

There have been other challenges: At the University of Illinois, professors have the final word on whether notes for their classes can be sold.

He is buoyed by the belief that he is helping students improve their academic careers--and making a buck or two while he’s at it.

“It’s not like they can put the notes under their pillow and wake up knowing everything,” Matis said. “They still have to study the material and take the exam.”

Nittany Notes are not casual jottings. Taken by students with at least 3.2 grade-point averages, they generally run several pages and include any announcements made in class. Sometimes they include graphics. Always they are printed on dark red paper to make photocopying next to impossible.

Professional note taker Kim Zwick, a liberal arts senior, said two factors make the job worthwhile: the money (pay usually runs about $300 per semester) and the added benefit of making her a better student.

“I tend to copy every word that comes out of the professor’s mouth,” she said.

But no matter how well organized the notes are, no matter how many parents give thanks for the academic turnaround their children make after using Nittany Notes, Matis said his business will always be an easy scapegoat for professors.

Some educators, while disappointed in the proliferation of businesses such as Nittany Notes--there are other, similar companies across the country--defended students for using them.

Larry Spence, the director of the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning at Penn State, sees the prospering of professional note takers as proof that the traditional lecture is obsolete.

“What the notes really point out are that today’s teaching techniques are not a particularly effective way of transmitting information,” said Spence. “So the students just catch on. There’s no reason to go into a room with 600 students and listen to something.

“It’s like putting them in sensory deprivation.”

Even Scott Kretchmar, an outgoing leader of the Faculty Senate at Penn State, agreed that lecturers could do more to motivate students.

“We have at our disposal ways to make academic shortcuts irrelevant and the faculty needs to use those methods,” he said.

John Marcinski, the director of the learning assistance program at Kean College in Union, N.J., said relying on the service could hurt students in a way they can’t foresee by robbing them of note-taking skills, a must in a competitive work environment.

“We’re not so much speaking about the physical act of writing it down . . . but the thought process that precedes it,” he said.

The doomsayers appear to have little effect on the students, who heartily defend the service’s existence. One member of the student government who tried to deny students access to the notes was forced to resign in disgrace.

“I have a quiz tomorrow,” said sophomore Tania Bohnaker as she left Nittany Notes, a thick pile of red photocopies under her arm. “Their notes are better than mine.”