Campus Clubs Make Study Guides

Having a little trouble cramming for your exam? If you’re a member of the Fox Club, or a number of other student groups, answers may only be a click away.
Some organizations, including the final clubs the Fox and the Spee, maintain study guide archives for their members, according to students in each of those clubs.

Members of campus Greek organizations, including the Delta Gamma and Kappa Kappa Gamma sororities, have also been compiling collections of study guides, according to their members.

Kappa Kappa Gamma, for example, hosts a Google group for members to upload and share study guides.

Some student organizations, such as the Black Students Association, also organize study guide archives for their members. “We had the good idea to use our Web site as a resource for students to study for finals,” said BSA president Timothy D. Turner ’09.

The BSA archive was originally established in the 2006-07 school year by the president of the BSA at the time, according to Turner.

“We all knew that people had study guides lying around on their hard drives,” he said. “We wanted to put them in one place, so it could be a tremendous help to students studying for exams.”

Sarah C. Anoke ’09, BSA webmaster, said students e-mail her to submit study guides to be uploaded onto the Web site. The BSA Web site is open to all undergraduates, as long as they create an account on the Web site with an official Harvard e-mail.

“This is our first year with a fully functioning Web site,” Anoke said. “We’ve been collecting study guides for a few years now, so the library is pretty extensive.”

During this exam period, there has been “a really big boom of people creating accounts” on the BSA Web site, Anoke said. This January alone, more than 200 new usernames were created.

Kristin E. McNelis ’11, a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma, said there is not a problem with clubs archiving study guides for their members.

“A lot of people organize study groups themselves with people in class,” she said.

She added that a lot of students in these clubs share study guides with friends. “So it’s not that much of a disadvantage,” she said.

Chelsea Connolly ’10 said that in general, she thinks that sharing study resources “shows very good cooperation between students” and “kind of bucks the cliche that Harvard is so competitive.”

But Connolly added that she considers the selective sharing within social organizations “an unfair advantage.”

—Staff writer Melody Y. Hu can be reached at melodyhu@fas.harvard.edu.