Starting this year, the Economics faculty society EFR will be offering its members free lecture summaries. The pilot project will start with the first block of the first-year Accounting course.
You can find summaries for just about any lecture. If you can’t source one from a senior-year student, you can always try online. But according to Emma Clemens (21), Vice President of the Economics faculty society EFR and student of Economics and Law, you can’t always count on a quality product. “I’ve used summaries from a number of sources myself. They often contain quite a few errors, or you can see that the person taking notes doesn’t really get it sometimes.”
Nevertheless, students dole out a lot of money for these summaries. Clemens: “You pay around EUR 20 per block. When you consider that each year consists of eight blocks, this adds up to a sizeable amount.”
Summaries written by honours students
According to Clemens, the former board members of EFR came up with the idea of making their own summaries and sharing them with the members. “After being appointed to the board, I could set to work on the idea straight away. I’m a strong supporter of this initiative, so it wasn’t difficult to get the ball rolling.” She then started looking for students who were good at writing summaries – for a fee, of course. “We contacted the honours class to see if anyone was interested. We subsequently selected Karl and Jasper from the respondents.”
Karl Naumann (19) writes the summaries, after which they’re checked by Jasper Bal (19). Both students are in the second year of the Econometrics and Economics bachelor programme. The first round was checked by the Accounting programme group. The summaries only deal with the lectures – a conscious decision, according to Clemens. “The summaries aren’t intended to replace the lectures, but rather complement them. Seminars are very important – precisely because they provide an opportunity to ask questions. Which is why we won’t be making summaries for those.”
Pilot project
The summaries will be published on a weekly basis, and will total around 13 pages per week. Since this is still a pilot project, for the moment, EFR will only offer summaries for the first block of the first year. This will gradually be expanded to include other years and blocks. The summaries are offered free of charge to EFR’s members and can be downloaded from the society’s website. EFR membership is free and open to every student.
