10 iPhone Apps That Make the Grade for College

by Nate Eddy

Stay up-to-date with coursework, assigned reading and announcements with Blackboard Learn, the application that delivers course information to your iPhone. The app is available to users running the Blackboard Learning System Release 7.1 or higher or Blackbird Learn for Course Delivery Enterprise release Version 9.0.

One of the finest news sources available, the NPR app is perfect for those big lecture classes no one is able to get through without napping. Hourly news updates and a playlist creation option lets you tune in to the shows you want, while you can also download stories for offline reading and revisit your favorite programs. Hey, it’s still learning, right?

Thanks to this app, gone are the days when students needed to lug around a Texas Instruments brick of a device that cost more than your bar tab on a regular Wednesday night (assuming that’s less than $150). This graphing calculator supports a multitude of mathematic functions and can plot and trace multiple equations in the same graph.

Using this app, students can access their CourseSmart eTextbooks as well as scan for photographs, tables and charts, skim thumbnails of pages, and view notes during an open book exam. CourseSmart offers more than 7,000 titles through 12 different publishers, and students can sign up for an account for free online.

Keeping track of fraternities, sororities and their members is a challenge (visual identification via Abercrombie & Fitch logos is usually easiest) but this app helps organize pledges, members and the houses they live in. From there you can add photos, contact information and keep track of active members once you’ve hazed yourself into the company of new friends.

For the competitive/neurotic/boastful student types out there, this app allows you to see your grade point average for each semester individually and provides a simple interface for calculating per-semester GPAs. Students can also change letter grades and the number of credit hours for courses to see what GPA they’d have at the semester’s end.

Between beer runs and breakfast, toga parties and tests, who has time to keep track of which class (or big bash) you’re due to attend next? Thankfully this app helps keep you on time (assuming you’re not passed out) with the ability to adjust appointments on a “To-do” list, with a Dynamic Day Line that shows you how much you can fit in today, and what you need to defer until tomorrow. Oh, sweet procrastination-enabling application, we love you.

Don’t fight your drunk dialing habit, embrace it with this app that randomly dials a friend (or, if you’re really lucky, your parents) after you shake it. Perfect for a late night/early morning prank on your new friends—you can also create an “excluded” list to avoid those painful calls to your work-study boss. Trust me, it’s a good feature to have.

So, in the 1990s, before technology, there were paper cards called “flashcards” once used to learn new information. A crude yet stimulating education tool, as many used to find. Now, thanks to technology and the FlashCards application, you can create digital versions with text, images, audio or any combination. Students can add groups and topics and browse through multiple cards, creating as many as are needed. That way, you can’t lose them while sitting in the quad on a windy day.

So you just flunked Macroeconomics—well done and welcome to the class of every college year of all time. You’re a bit down, understandably, so use this IQ Test app to boost your confidence. More diversion than strict science, this app nevertheless was developed by psychologists with the use of Prof. Hans Eysenck’s (best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality) works. It will also compare your score to well-known people (Madonna is smarter than JFK, apparently) and sports a clean, simple interface.