The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

Internet tutoring guarantees good grades

  • The Class Connection is a new online studying method helping students across the country get better grades
  • The Web site is so confident in success that they are offering $1,000 in free tutoring if a students grades do not improve
  • Students across the country stand behind the Class Connection's help with their grades

Students who are looking for a new method to improve their grades need not look any further. A tutoring Web site, theClassConnection.com will help improve grades -— it guarantees it.

Nicole Walker, the Class Connection's spokeswoman, issued a press release explaining the Class Connection's tutoring methods.

"Simply upload your lecture notes for each class at theClassConnection.com, click a single button to automatically generate a digital flashcard deck from those notes or create your own flashcards," the statement said. "You then use the Class Connection's point-and-click card builder, and then study the decks when the system sends you reminders."

These reminders adhere to the date of the student's test, according to Ben Jedd, the Web site's chief communication officer.

"We have a calendar that students plug test dates into," Jedd said. "Then we have study reminders linked to our flashcards that will remind students when to study based on the results of their flashcard decks."

Class Connection is so confident it will succeed that it has begun offering $1,000 of free tutoring through SmartThinking.com to help students pick their grades up.

"We began the free tutoring in the fall of 2008 and we will have results from that promotion by the end of this semester," Jedd said. "We will request that the students sends us their schedule and syllabus early on, then at the end of the semester we have them send us a copy of their transcript to prove that it did not improve their GPA."

But Jedd does not see this as being a very big problem.

"So far, it has been a really great success as we have received

nothing but positive feedback," Jedd said. "This has been a really crazy time for us. We have grown rapidly since last semester. Our staff has grown sevenfold."

The Class Connection, according to Jedd, was created by two University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates and was taken nationwide just this year.

The reason for this success, according to Jedd, is that the Web site allows students from around the country to share their notes with each other.

"Right now we have tens of thousands of students using the Web site," Jedd said. "We expect the number of users to grow every week."

Toddy Joyce, a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, just started using the Web site.

"I was studying so hard for one of my classes but I kept getting bad grades on the tests and quizzes," Joyce said. "I tried it for my last test and I did considerably better. It really helps you know material and it is so simple to use."

Sean Fitzpatrick, a junior at the College of the Holy Cross, said he thinks the Class Connection is a miracle worker.

"It is awesome," Fitzpatrick said. "I would so often spend so much of my time either writing out flashcards or outlines without even getting to know the material. This Web site helps you be good about when and what to study. It's like having my own personal tutor."

The Class Connection also allows you to track classes, deadlines and other academic obligations, along with chapter summaries of more than 100 textbooks, according to the Web site.

Fitzpatrick said he thinks some students don't trust online tutoring Web sites, which makes people hesitant to join.

"My advice is to just try it at least once," Fitzpatrick said. "It is free so there is nothing to lose. People do not realize how much they can gain from this."

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