Penn Students Can Now Pay Money Not to Go to Class

Sometimes I worry that the best minds of my generation are hell-bent on spending the rest of their lives creating start-ups with little-to-no discernible societal value. Enter “Noteriety,” a start-up that allows students to buy and sell their class notes.

Users, who must register with a Penn email address, can anonymously post and request notes and study materials from specific classes. Buyers get exclusive access to the notes for two weeks, then they go into a database that anyone with a $5 per month subscription can use.

The notes themselves are priced at whatever cost the buyers and sellers can agree on. The Daily Pennsylvanian chirpily frames this as a neat fix for students who miss class. The more obvious implication is that students can now just skip class with less anxiety. To be sure, students have always shared notes with one another–especially before big exams–but the establishment of an actual marketplace would seem to standardize and legitimize the practice to a troubling degree.

“Instead of having 100 people spending time making 100 cheat sheets, we have one person make one and then sell it to everyone else,” one of the startup’s founders, a Wharton sophomore, told the DP. Uh, awesome! As one commenter below the DP story put it, “The Whartonization of Penn is now complete.” [DP]