<p>Hey so im in this tough humanities class and we have to read this really dull book. The Republic by Plato. I cant bring myself to read it and fall asleep everytime or get into something else. I've been sparknoting the first few chapters. I am reading everything else in my other classes but am using sparknotes just for this book... Will i still realistically have a chance on doing well in the class if I sparknote this book? I did that a few times in highschool and did fine... But what are most people's experiences been like with sparknotes in college and not reading an entire book??? I know its not morally right and I feel bad but I just cant bring myself to read this stupid book. Any people got A's in literature classes and completed sparknoted a book??</p>
<p>Without knowing more about your syllabus, I doni't know whether using Sparknotes alone will be enough. (I am also not familiar with the Sparknotes for that text.) If you're spending more than a day or two on "The Republic," though, I suspect that it won't. </p>
<p>If you really find the book that boring, though -- and it's too bad, because it's a really great book -- maybe you would benefit from reading other commentaries as well. The Copleston "History of Philosophy" series is first-rate and does include a discussion of the text -- as well as having a number of other discussions throughout the series of work that is at least partly in response to Plato. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) is another great resource, and it offers 6 suggestions for "general discussions" of the text, none of which I have read, so I'm no help there. (Those 6 are books. The Copleston and Stanford Encyclopedia discussions are much shorter.) Your professor can probably recommend some other papers or books. I believe The Teaching Company also sells a series of DVD lectures on "The Republic" by David Roochnik, although The Teaching Company's products are really expensive if you don't wait for them to go on sale.</p>
<p>Obviously, any of these resources is going to be most useful to you if you use them to help you as you read the text, and I'm not going to suggest that you shouldn't do that. But if you think you need something besides Sparknotes and the text itself, you might find some of these helpful.</p>
<p>If you need some help figuring out why "The Republic" is interesting, you could try reading it while thinking about whether the American political system could be improved (you are not likely to agree with him, at least at the outset, about how we can best be governed), whether the administration at your school should have the authority to compel students to take general education courses instead of just letting you study whatever you want, and so on. The book is, in other words, about issues that really matter to us today.</p>
<p>Sparknotes owns everything.</p>
<p>I have to read that book too. My suggestion is to read the book anyway, especially if they're going to ask details about the book. I use Spark Notes after I read the book because sometimes books are a little hard to follow in my class. But I don't recommend not reading the book.</p>
<p>In my opinion, Sparknotes for the Republic won't do it for you. I've read the book and the Sparknotes before, and the way the book is structured (Socratic dialogue) makes it really hard to get the individual points of each "speaker."</p>
<p>You can try but...I think the point of college, more so than high school, is to truly master the material. You're not doing that if you're using Sparknotes.</p>
<p>...</p>
<p>You can, of course, do whatever you want, though. If it's just one book you don't read, you may be able to get away with it.</p>
<p>Spark Notes is completely useless once your enter college because professors look for IDEAS, not necessarily "correct" answers. They want to know YOUR interpretations of the book/passage via papers and class discussions. Your high school teachers cared about right and wrong answers. Those days are over, time to think for yourselves.</p>
<p>Its useful for History and stuff because it's basically all facts.</p>
<p>use the facts in sparknotes to develop your own ideas. i remember almost resorting to sparknotes for the same book when i was a freshman, but the professor just lost me when he got this the cave lol. i ended up dropping the course and took it again with a professor who covered different philosophers and was much more entertaining in class discussions. so that's always an option too.</p>
<p>Depends on what the test covers. If it's on the plot and content, Sparknotes should be okay. But if it's on rhetoric, writing techniques, etc, you should suck it up and read the book.</p>
<p>I like to read the Sparknotes, skim the book itself, and then re-read the Sparknotes. It's time-consuming, but for novels/plays/etc. that confuse me, it is what works best.</p>
<p>I think it really depends on your class. Last year I had one class for which I sparknoted most of the books and got a 100 on the exam, basically cause i knew the questions would be short and broad because of the structure of the exam. but i would never spark note a book in certain of my classes, for example, in an english seminar where you have to discuss it and write papers and such. </p>
<p>what is your grade based on in the class?</p>
<p>also if you have to write papers where you're expected to cite the text (i.e. any paper you ever right) not having read the book will make it hard to find the proper quotes.</p>
<p>The strategy I used in high school for stuff like this was to just force myself to get through the book, and then read the sparknotes to make sure I actually understood what was going on.</p>
<p>Go to the library at your university and look up research about the book you are supposed to read... even a quick glance at some of the books will help you to understand the work and may motivate you enough to get through it. There will be stacks of books about Plato's work and you will learn enough to get through your work.</p>
<p>Use Sparknotes to help you outline and write papers. No matter what, you still need to read the book. Sparknotes helped me make sure I didn't forget or leave out any important themes or details in analysis papers (very important in English and other literature courses).</p>