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It’s that time of year again; the dust is finally settling as the semester has come to an end and students can breathe a sigh of relief. In fact, I noticed that “gpa calculator” was a popular search term this morning according to Google Trends. On Sunday, we dedicated our Sunday Series to taking a look at websites with high increases in monthly visitors from the “Student Resources” category, so I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look today.

Looking at traffic to the category over the past two years, unique visitors usually spike around the start of each semester and then drop off significantly once classes are over.

As you would imagine, traffic to summary sites like sparknotes.com see a huge increase in the last few weeks of summer and continues into the school year. This can most likely be attributed to students who skipped out on their summer reading in favor of getting a quick summary online (not that I ever did that…).

You’ll notice that Sparknotes sees much larger traffic numbers than the other sites. I checked out their search referrals and it appears as though a lot of traffic is driven by their “No Fear Shakespeare” section where you can see modern day English translation alongside Shakespeare’s original texts.

Students: what are some of your favorite online resources?