We’ve all seen those YouTube taglines: “10 Apps Every College Student Should Use,” “10 Essential Student iPad Pro Apps” and “20 MUST HAVE SCHOOL APPS,” to name a few. Especially for freshmen, these intriguing taglines are designed to draw people in. These apps promise an easier time in school, such as calculators to help you solve those math problems you don’t need for your major, but you’re forced to do.
Some apps also write essays for a fee, which is wrong.
It has gotten to the point that many professors have banned cell phone use from their classes. Not just because of apparent distraction but because many students are using their phones to cheat on their classwork.
Year after year, videos flood the internet detailing the best apps for students today. The best part about it is that many of these apps do genuinely attempt to help people. Apps such as P. Schedule help remind you about when and where your classes are. They also tell you about that paper that’s due in two hours.
However, for every good app, there are ones that are designed to make college so easy that you fail. It’s a weird concept, but it’s fundamentally correct. Apps like Cymath are designed to solve uncommon math problems and are marketed out to high school and college students. The problem is that, even though some show you how to solve the problem, they don’t help you actually learn the material.
While in most cases, this is perfectly fine to get that classwork grade in that throwaway class, when the midterm or final exam hits and you have those tests that are 25% of your grade or more, these apps won’t be there to help you. Attempting to use these apps could, at the very least, get you a zero on that test, assuming your professor is nice. In some cases, you could be facing suspension, community service or worse just for using the apps you used for your classwork.
Moreover, it’s not just education apps; it’s social apps too. GroupMe, while fundamentally used as a group chat app for social groups on campus also has been used to communicate about classwork both within and between classes.
While collaboration is a good thing and should happen within the student body, some students don’t use these tutor chats for that reason. These students are distributing classwork answers. It makes passing the class a little easier, but when these same students get to the midterms and fail, it’s a shock and awe that students should direct elsewhere.
These apps are great for keeping students organized and foster collaboration and communication. At the same time, it could directly lead to many students failing classes or worse if not used appropriately.
