For many students, the academic portion of college consists of a four (or more) year quest to find the easiest professors on campus. College may be a time to learn new things, but graduate schools don’t tend to care how much you’ve broadened your horizons - to them, GPA and test scores are all that matter.
There have been a number of popular sites that ask students to rate their professors to help highlight the best (or easiest) ones, but most of the reviews on these sites tend to be highly polarized - students tend to either love a professor or hate them. The same is true for user-submitted grades, as students are more likly to share that they’ve flunked or aced a class than if they’ve done so-so. CampusBuddy, a new Facebook application that launched last week, is looking to take some of the bias out of these ratings. The company has gathered grading records from 250 schools nationwide, allowing students to accurately get a feeling for just how generous a professor is at the end of the term.
Every record in the CampusBuddy database comes from public schools located around the country, as these are legally obligated to release their grades upon request. Pick-A-Prof, a similar rating site, helped pave the way for this kind of database, going as far as suing UC Davis for access to their records. CampusBuddy CEO Mike Moradian acknowleges that the two sites are similar, but says that Pick-A-Prof charges a $10 annual fee while CampusBuddy is free (the site plans to use advertising to generate revenue). He also says that while anyone could conceivably create their own database using this public information, it is very time consuming - some schools have taken up to 8 months to comply with a request.
The CampusBuddy Facebook application also includes some community features, which Moradian says serve as a replacement for the Facebook Network pages that have been eliminated. Users can see other students that are in their classes, leave comments about their school with prospective and current students, and upload and download files from old classes. The app also supports schools that it doesn’t have grades for, as well as high schools. In the next few months CampusBuddy will launch a website to complement its Facebook app, though Moradian says this will depend on when Facebook Connect is finally launched.
The site will see stiff competition from established rating sites including PickAProf and RateMyProfessors. The site will also have to face off with Koofers and Check My Campus on Facebook, both of which were just chosen as winners of cash grants from fbFund.
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Yeah, people are really going to enter their real grades. I’d install it just to mess this up. This is hilarious.
That’s the point, most of the grades aren’t self reported, so you can’t screw them up.
All 80 million grades on CampusBuddy are official school data. There is no self-reporting, nor is it allowed.
CampusBuddy offers much more than official grades– it also allows users to see and interact with their classmates and other students on campus through Facebook.
High School students can interact with current students at colleges they are interested in, and network with other prospective students to of the colleges as well.
More info is available on the CampusBuddy app about page at:
http://www.new.facebook.com/ap.....6299187462
CampusBuddy used to operate as mycampusbuddy.com and it was a good service until the site started throwing errors like crazy. The site was dead for a several months and then resurrected itself as a Facebook app.
I found the stand alone website quite useful. I haven’t tried the Facebook app yet.
This is a great idea. I wish I had this when I was in school. Best of luck!
being a student myself and with grudges against my professors i think its the right tool i can use to avenge myself.it can be use as a fun tool.
This is interesting stuff. Thanks for the heads up on this. I was directed to your post by a Twitter friend.
I think this would be a great post to submit to the Carnival of College Admission, which includes news and views on college life–in addition to information about the transition from high school to college. Informative, breaking news that admissions folks would like to know more about.
The Carnival’s submission page is here: http://blogcarnival.com/bc/submit_5094.html
Thanks for considering this idea.
Thanks.
i really wish i had this when i was still in school. will this incorporate grad school grades?
cool, like that Service and facebook is the sales Partner nr. 1