If your professor or teaching assistant hasn’t told you not to go to notehall.com or ratemyprofessors.com yet, you should ask him or her about it the next time you’re in class. If you’re lucky, they’ll make a funny face. However, they will probably tell you the websites are either contrived or that visiting the sites will reflect poorly on your karmic report card.

That’s totally bunk, so here’s the skinny:

Notehall.com:

It’s a website where kids upload word documents with their lecture notes or filled-out study guides for other kids to buy on the Internet. The site is organized by course number, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find your classes and see if someone’s been taking good notes.

Are you taking economics 200? Did you know that someone has posted daily study notes and study guides for four different professors who are teaching that class? Is yours among them? Only one way to find out. Will you never have to take notes during economics 200 again? Maybe!

Some of you aren’t auditory learners. Maybe you retain information better with flashcards or making visual maps than you do listening to a lecture. Don’t let the expectation to take notes limit your motivation to find ways around it and learn enough information to get the grade you want in the class.

Basically, if you’re willing to shell out a few bucks a week for your class notes and are lucky enough to be in a big enough class that someone decided they could make money selling their notes online,

notehall.com is your friend.

Ratemyprofessors.com:

It’s a website that tells you which teachers are easy graders and which teachers are attractive (or both).

Ratemyprofessors.com reviews boil down to two extremes: “”OMG This was the greastest prof of my life,”” or “”FML This was the worst prof of my life.”” If there’s a lot of the former, and the teacher has a lot of high scores for things like “”clarity”” and “”helpfulness,”” it means that’s probably an easy class to take.

Think about it this way: At the end of the semester, you’ll have the chance to take a different professor for General Chemistry. You could take Professor Example again, or you could take Professor Strawman, who is a way easier grader because he’s disillusioned with the educational system.

If you go with Strawman you’ll learn less, but do you even like chemistry? Are you going to use it heavily in your major? No? Thanks, ratemyprofessors.com, for saving me from hours of extra work and a lower grade point average.

Additionally, professors might have a chili pepper next to their name, indicating if they are “”hot”” or not. A Tuesday Daily Wildcat report revealed that professors with chili peppers are not down with the designation, indicating that it gets in the way of “”what matters.””

But that’s totally arbitrary. If you want to pay this school’s ridiculous fees to take easy courses and ogle older women (or men), more power to you. It’s lots of fun.

I know you’re new and don’t always know where the party is at, so you might spend a lot of your time in your dorm room. That’s perfect, because that means you can put these primo cuts of advice steak into practice right away.

Good luck, and happy coasting.

— Remy Albillar is a senior majoring in English and creative writing. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.