David Alexander wasn’t shocked when he heard last week that notes from his anatomy lectures were for sale on the internet.

At the same time, he wasn’t OK with it.

“It looks like I’m going to have to go back to putting on my syllabi that my lecture notes are copyrighted and I don’t want people selling them,” said Alexander, an associate scientist in KU’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “It’s one thing if you’re providing notes to a friend who was sick, but it’s something else to profit on what is essentially someone else’s intellectual property.”

Multiple students’ versions of Biology 240 notes are among hundreds if not thousands of pages of KU class notes for sale on for-profit websites that encourage students to upload their own notes to make money and download other students’ notes to study.

The practice — which the KU administration opposes — is being met with varying levels of concern by professors and, apparently at least for now, not much financial success by students here.

Pencil and test

Kansas University students walk through campus between classes on Jayhawk Boulevard.

“I got an email saying, ‘Would you like to make some extra money? It’s easy,'” said graduate student Mina Riazi.

Riazi said she watched an online tutorial for instructions and tips — such as emailing classmates to suggest they buy your notes — before uploading notes from one of her classes to StudySoup.com. But none sold, she said, so she didn’t get the $150-per-class base pay that first tempted her, not to mention money from additional sales.

Riazi said she liked the website’s student-to-student concept, but when asked if she would try selling more notes in the future she said, “probably not.”

On Flashnotes.com, Florida State University’s Tony2050 tops the “Leaderboard” with $11,953 in sales. But hundreds of notes posted by KU students over the past year yielded only a couple sales, according to the website’s listings.

StudySoup.com boasted 1,167 KU students using the website last week, although a cursory scan of KU sellers didn’t turn up any who had gleaned followers or reviews on the site.

The Journal-World emailed Riazi and more than a dozen other KU students selling notes on the sites, but the handful who responded said they hadn’t made any money. Other websites featuring notes from KU classes include Koofers.com and StudyBlue.com.

One KU student, who didn’t respond to a request for a phone interview, said she quit uploading notes partway into this semester.

“No one really has taken up any interest in buying them,” she wrote in an email, “which makes sense because most people know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody in the class that they can get notes from for free, and maybe even an explanation of the lecture too.”

Copyright infringement?

This semester, noting that online note-selling ventures had been actively soliciting KU students, the Office of the Provost sent a memo to faculty reminding them of KU’s position on the matter.

That is, “no university authorization exists for an enrolled student to take notes for the purpose of selling them for profit,” according to the Provost’s Statement on Commercial Note-Taking Ventures, first approved in 1999.

A combination of university rules and copyright laws mean course instructors get to decide whether to allow students to use their course material for profit, according to KU.

“Many students who participate in commercial note-taking do not recognize that doing so is against university policy and a violation of the intellectual property rights of another,” KU Vice Provost Marta Caminero-Santangelo said. “Faculty are encouraged to address the issue of note-taking with their students and include information about it in their course syllabus.”

KU’s statement on note-taking suggests language for doing so and says instructors who believe their copyright rights have been violated can pursue legal action.

The provost’s office did not provide information about whether KU had pursued disciplinary action against any student who profited from selling notes online. Caminero-Santangelo did say the university makes efforts to curb student solicitation by such websites and have student notes removed from them.

Riazi, for one, said she didn’t think to ask permission from her teacher before putting her notes online. “I guess it didn’t cross my mind.”

Instructors split

Alexander, the anatomy instructor, said he included a copyright reminder on his syllabus years ago but dropped it because the issue seemed to disappear.

Now, he said, he’ll probably add the copyright language back.

“If it was widely known that students could buy notes for my lecture, why would anybody come?” he said. “At the same time, my feeling is that if they do just get notes from online they’re missing a lot of stuff … so it’s sort of a false sense of security.”

Presumed ineffectiveness is one reason some other teachers, like micro- and macroeconomics lecturer Brian Staihr, aren’t bothered by students trying to sell notes.

“Any student who thinks buying the notes is going to work as a substitute for coming to class, at least for my class, is going to learn real fast that’s not true,” Staihr said. He added, “If somebody’s not a great note taker and they want to supplement their notes with somebody else’s, I think that’s not a bad idea.”

English professor and KU Faculty Senate President James Carothers said he didn’t “begrudge” students an opportunity to make much-needed extra money.

However, he said, some faculty worry their lectures won’t be portrayed accurately by notes put up for sale online.

“We have no way of knowing how accurate their reports are or how they’re used,” Carothers said. “And for that reason many faculty do not allow people to use laptops or smartphones in the classroom.”

Certainly, some students take better notes than others.

Many sellers tout their note taking skills in their online profiles, such as these from KU students on StudySoup:

“I am a fantastic note taker and also use examples to help along the way.”

“I always come to class and pay attention to detail so my notes are helpful for exams!”

Or, “My handwriting is not the best but it is readable.”

Alexander, at least, considers online note-selling sites buyer-beware.

“I’ve seen some students’ notes,” he said, “and I’d be really unhappy if I paid for them.”