One Class

What is One Class?

One Class is a note-sharing site for college students, paying college students to take and upload notes for sale. But of the sites that do this, One Class is the least transparent about how you get paid.

How it works

You sign up and can start answering questions and/or uploading notes on the site. The site will give you “credits” for some activities and pay cash commissions for others.

Credits get you access to other free study materials on the site. Cash is paid to your PayPal account.

Cash vs. credit

What activities pay in credits versus cash? Basically everything you do here earns credits.

If you sign in and look at the site each day, you can get 20 “free” credits. You get 50 credits for uploading notes. If you answer questions, you get 20 credits.

What are credits worth? They have no monetary value. They can only be used within the site and the site has the right to change what your credits can “buy” at any time.

Currently, you can get 3 days of free access to other people’s notes when you have at least 500 credits. You get 20 credits for answering questions. So, that equates to roughly 25 answers — or about 10 uploads of notes.

Cash rewards

You only get cash rewards when someone subscribes to the service to get access to your notes or your answers. You also might get cash if you are one of the top contributors to the site in any given week. If you are the #1 top contributor, you get $25. For second place, you get $10 and you get $5 for third place.

How will you know if someone joins to get access to your notes? That’s unclear. Unlike uploading notes on Study Soup, where you get your own tracking code, there doesn’t appear to be any way for students to see when someone has joined to get access to their notes or answers.

Trust

You apparently need to trust One Class to tell you. And, as we explain below, that’s not necessarily wise. However, the site says that if someone buys a subscription because of you, you’ll get 20% of the revenue. That’s $6 to $24 per purchase, according to One Class.

If you get cash rewards, they be paid via PayPal once a month. But you only get paid when you have at least $25 available in your account.

A little background

One Class has been around for years. And over the course of those years, it’s changed the way it pays contributors numerous times. At first, the site paid in credits that could be turned into cash. Later, it let contributors turn their credits into gift cards. The site still uses credits, but now they can only be used on the site to get access to other people’s notes for free.

And you need a lot of credits to do that. Considering that you might get just 20 credits for answering questions, you’d have to answer 25 questions to reach the lowest-level of rewards.

This level gets you three days of free access to other courses — but you can only “unlock” three documents per day.

Credits can be withheld or reduced

Importantly, One Class’ terms of service allow the site to cancel, withhold or reduce the value of your credits at any time at “OneClass’ absolute discretion.” As you can see in the section titled “what their note-takers say,” reducing the value of credits is not uncommon.

Also quoting from the site’s terms: “Credits are nonreturnable, nonrefundable, nontransferable and cannot be converted into monetary currency or used to redeem any goods or services outside of the Website…Upon termination of a User’s account by either OneClass or the User, all Credits remaining in that User’s OneClass account will automatically expire.”

Recommendations

There are several companies that pay you to share your college class notes with fellow students. Almost all of them are better than One Class.

Some we recommend: Study Soup, Nexus Notes and Stuvia.

What their note-takers say (from TrustPilot):

They currently owe me hundreds of dollars for uploaded notes that has been requested over a month. They have completely stopped replying to me even though I have sent them multiple emails to both their account team and customer support team. Worst part is even with the other students and friends that sent them messages to the support team that claims “usually replies in 2 hours”, completely false btw, responded to them days later, with some not even receiving a response. If this ever gets the opportunity to be seen (they’ll try and flag every negative review even if it is legitimate), I highly recommend looking elsewhere.

Rip off

They increased the points needed to cash out. Before you needed 800 points to get $10 gift card. Now you need 1200 point to get $10. Why are my notes worth less now? To cash out I need to upload 16 notes to get $10 when before you needed almost 10 notes. 16 notes are basically all the notes from one class. Talk about a rip-off.

When I first started on OneClass, you could redeem $10 dollars at a time for Amazon or Paypal. With the old version, I had made 40 dollars in the span of about two weeks from uploading notes. Not a lot in terms of how long it took me to perfect my notes. But considering that no one else pays for them, it was worth it. Before I finished my semester, I had collected enough credits to redeem another 20 dollars. I decided to leave them there so I could save up, and redeem them when I got enough for a 100 dollar redemption. It was a way of avoiding pointless spending. Joke’s on me though, because now the instant redemption of 10 dollars has been removed.

Where’s customer support?

The support team was responsive and the gift card redemptions always came on time until recently. (2020) Honest critique: Its support team can go days without answering your question. Also they will never reach out to u if there is an issue with your notes or if your gift cards are being delayed. You’ll always find yourself trying to communicate with them. Personally One Class is a great site to earn cash for notes, however it could be much better.

Updated 2/1/2023