Cramster is centerpiece of NY Times feature

May 18, 2009

Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7 on the Physics Exam? Click Here.

In the old days, college students might turn to classmates for help during all-night cram sessions before final exams. Now their study buddies are just as likely to be commercial Web sites with step-by-step solutions to textbook problems, copies of previous exams, reams of lecture notes, summaries of literary classics, and real-time help with physics, math and computer science problems.

“It’s a backup,” said Chris O’Connor, a pre-med sophomore at Columbia University who relies on a popular site, Cramster, to unravel the mysteries of complex math and science problems.

“Many professors who return homework won’t tell you how you got it wrong — just that it’s wrong. This way you can complete the feedback process, which is essential to learning.”

But as companies with playful names like Cramster, Course Hero, Koofers and SparkNotes are transforming the way undergraduates like Mr. O’Connor study, some professors and ethicists are questioning whether such Web sites encourage cheating and undermine the mental sweat equity of day-to-day learning by seducing students with ready-made solutions and essays.

On Course Hero, for example, students can type in a college name and course number to unearth the previous semester’s particle physics final exam. They can find examples of research papers on, say, the causes of World War I. For homework, Cramster supplies step-by-step solutions to problems in more than 200 college-level math and science textbooks.

“There are professors who don’t change their questions from semester to semester, and one of the things that this raises is how problematic that is,” said Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity, which is part of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. “Part of what’s valuable about homework is that it gives you a safe space to practice and struggle.”

But defenders of the Web sites — including some professors — say that teachers should not be recycling exams and that students who simply copy homework solutions hurt themselves at exam time. Many of the documents posted on the Web sites, like term papers and prior exams, have long been available to members of fraternities and sororities, which archive them (this has also been a source of complaints in the past).

David A. Sachs, an associate dean in the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Pace University who is joining an advisory panel for Cramster, said in an interview that colleges need to rethink practices in light of the Internet age.

“As faculty, we need to be better educated about what the possibilities are, and the truth is you can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Dr. Sachs said. “If Cramster and all these companies disappeared tomorrow, you could still do a Google search and find what you’re looking for in five minutes.”

David J. Kim, president and chief executive officer of Course Hero, which started early last year, said the premise of the company was to “bring the concept of study groups” online. “A student may know one or two people in their class,” he said, “but we wanted to provide an online community where you could connect with students from different colleges studying the same subject.”

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

Mr. Kim also said that Course Hero, which warns users against cheating and plagiarism, had honored a handful of requests from professors to remove certain notes. “They felt that some material was released only to their students and they didn’t want it disseminated beyond that,” he said.

Cramster, which went online in 2003, has carved out a different niche, with many of its 500,000 registered users visiting the site specifically for solutions to math and science textbook problems. Solutions to odd-numbered problems are available free, but college students must pay $9.95 a month to see the even-numbered ones (solutions to even-numbered problems are not available for high school textbooks).

Students can also post queries to Cramster’s 3,000 “experts,” who are rated for quality (just like sellers on eBay) and earn “karma” points for rewards like laptops, iPods and gift cards. An expert, according to Aaron Hawkey, Cramster’s chief executive officer, could be a brilliant high school senior bound for M.I.T., a professor or a retired engineer. In addition, the company has in-house staff members who moderate the question-and-answer board.

“There’s no doubt our site can be abused,” Mr. Hawkey acknowledged. “Let’s say I have a take-home test. We had one incident where someone posted a question on our site that was the same one on an exam.”

He said that Cramster had banned individual students from the site after receiving complaints from professors. “We know that some professors don’t think their students should see the step-by-step solutions,” he said. “But homework is worth such a small percentage of your grade. And Cramster can’t take the exam for you.”

Some professors counter that sites like Cramster have helped devalue homework. “For large undergraduate entry-level classes, it’s something you need to take into account and have a strategy for,” said Kyle Cranmer, an assistant professor of physics at New York University. “One way of coping is not to weigh the homework as much, or you try and adjust the problems.”

William H. Kinney, an assistant professor of physics at the State University at Buffalo, Cramster’s biggest source of users in New York, said that for students who have genuinely wrestled with homework problems, the ability to identify where they got stuck — by taking a peek at Cramster’s step-by-step solutions, for example — can be a “great thing.” But he finds some of the items available on the site disturbing.

“Students have projects where they’re supposed to write a piece of code,” he said. “One thing the Cramster computer science message board has in large quantities is functional computer codes that you can cut and paste. In the computer science department here, that would be serious academic misconduct.”

Ultimately, though, Professor Kinney said the system is “self-policing.” “If the students just copy down answers to the homework, they will not do well on the exam,” he said. “The students who behave ethically will do well.”

Eric Jongsma, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering at SUNY Buffalo, said he had found Cramster invaluable for extra practice and problem sets, but learned the hard way not to abuse it, after getting lazy last fall and turning to the site to “just plug in the numbers” for physics homework.

“When it came to the test, I tried to learn multiple chapters at the last minute,” he said. “I failed the test.”

Cramster profiled in large college newspapers

THE SPECTRUM (SUNY At Buffalo): "Cramster craze hits campuses"

THE DAILY COUGAR (University of Houston): "Cramster founder defends Net studying"

DAILY REVEILLE (Louisiana State University): "Homework-help web site raises academic concerns"

THE LANTERN: (Ohio State University): "Web site aids OSU students in studies"

THE DAILY COLLEGIAN (Penn State): "Online community offers study help"

THE LARIAT (Saddleback College): "More than just socializing on Facebook"

Cramster.com featured on front page of "Personal Journal" article in Wall Street Journal

Do Study Sites Make the Grade?

At 10 p.m. on a recent night, high-school senior Scott Landers was having trouble figuring out differential calculus in order to compare rates of change.

With his professor unreachable and the exam set for the next day, he sent a shot in the dark to Cramster, an "online study community" recommended by classmates.

Within two hours, Mr. Landers was surprised to find his answer pop up in his email, followed by a few more responses the next morning, all pointing in the same direction. "I thought it was cool that there were people out there actually willing to help me," he says.

Cramster, an online study community, helped high-school senior Scott Landers with differential calculus.

Web sites such as Cramster aim to revolutionize the way students study, much the way that networking sites like Facebook have changed the way people socialize.

Course Hero, launched last year primarily for college students, already holds a library of more than two million course documents, including homework, class notes and graded essays, uploaded by students enrolled at 3,000 different colleges. Koofers (a nickname at Virginia Tech for old tests passed around at fraternities) allows students from about 25 state universities to submit posts about the difficulty of courses taught by different instructors at their schools. It also offers average semester grades from instructors. Enotes, geared mainly to high-school students, allows peers to form discussion groups and pose questions to experts -- usually teachers -- who are paid by the Web site.

Not surprisingly, at a time when schools are cutting back on classes and faculty, and students are cutting down on expensive tutors, visits to the sites are skyrocketing. Cramster, which has more than 500,000 registered users, says its monthly subscriptions, at $10, are about double what they were a year ago, according to co-founder Aaron Hawkey. Registered users on Course Hero have doubled each month so far this year, says President David Kim, though he declines to reveal the number.

Many teachers, however, aren't enthusiastic about the sites, claiming they promote dishonesty among students. In addition to answering homework questions, some sites offer test answers and professors' old tests. Cramster offers a bank of answers to various problems, along with the steps taken to get to the solution, for 225 different textbooks.

While it's one thing for students to share class notes, it's another for students to easily access old exams created by a professor, says Teddi Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. "It's not unreasonable for a professor to recycle an old test," she says, which would give study-site users an unfair advantage. The old exam also belongs to the professor, she says, while the Web site ultimately profits from using it. "That's unethical," she says.

"Some teachers think we're the worst thing to ever happen," says Koofers Chief Strategy Officer Michael Rihani. To address such concerns, many sites make an effort to discuss cheating up front. Mr. Rihani says he approaches honor committees for each university before posting course materials and past tests on the site, "to make sure we're not promoting something that's going to get students in trouble."

Enotes allows students to ask one free question per day, to prevent cheating. Cramster states flatly on its site that it will ban users who cheat, and offers a place for teachers to contact them if they discover cheating. For high-school students, Cramster offers only odd-numbered textbook solutions, which thwarts students from getting perfect scores on homework assignments.

Michael Grams, a physics professor at South Dakota State University, emailed Cramster to address conflicts with a student copying homework from the site. He reports that a site official stepped in to confirm the student's use of the site -- and ultimately banned her. "I'll give them credit for doing that," Mr. Grams says, though he still considers the site a "huge problem."

The study sites argue that they are mimicking the contents of countless study halls and cram sessions across the country: Notes, syllabi, homework and other documents get passed around. "The common sharing of notes, discussion that's articulated in a way they understand, are things that can be done online today," says Course Hero's Mr. Kim.

With the Internet, the sites say, it's inevitable that all this information will be available to students anyway. It's up to the schools, they say, to come to terms with modern times. "We're just putting things out in the open," says Koofers' Mr. Rihani, who says his site is making old tests previously accessible only to fraternity members, available to more students.

Mr. Rihani notes that putting old tests online can help force more professors to refresh their old exams periodically.

The study sites are likely to propel schools to rethink the way they teach. "What these sites are doing, is simply accumulating information that students would like to know, and putting it out there," says Virginia Tech marketing professor Jim Littlefield.

In fact, Professor Grams, the physics professor from South Dakota State University, said his students' use of Cramster has forced him to lessen the weight of graded homework to 10% of the final grade from 30% in the past. "I didn't like doing that," he says, "but I was pretty much forced" because of the study sites. Previously, he weighed homework equal to exams, in order to give students that worked hard a leg up.

Most sites charge a subscription fee while leaving some portion of their offerings free to the public. Course Hero charges $20 a month for students to access its offerings, although they can forgo the monthly charge by uploading at least 30 documents useful to peers, such as class notes or a graded test. Most of Cramster's offerings are free, but the site charges about $10 a month, or $50 a year, for "premium" membership, entitling students to more access and quicker response time on message boards.

In some cases, even professors have used the sites. David Choi, who teaches entrepreneurship classes at Loyola Marymount University's College of Business in Los Angeles, last year taught a course on product development to students enrolled at two different colleges. He uploaded class materials to Course Hero so that students from both schools could easily access the same files. "Information technology dramatically affects how we do business now," including teaching, he says.

In academia today, the sharing of information is generally much more ubiquitous, as more professors shift to "open courseware" publishing or "wiki" models where multiple writers can contribute. Yale and MIT now post entire course materials online.

The traditional model of university teaching is "that we are the givers of information," says Ms. Fishman. "We need to move to a model where the different sorts of information available are addressed and students need to learn to be critical consumers of information."

Matt Hastings, a senior at Virginia Tech majoring in finance, says he logs on to Koofers before choosing classes so he can research average grades by different professors teaching the same class. Last spring, Mr. Hastings signed up for a course on investments that fit well with his schedule. But after attending the first class, Mr. Hastings says he felt that the professor's teaching style "wouldn't keep my attention."

After class, he logged onto Koofers and looked at student reviews of other professors who taught the same course. Ultimately, he reworked his schedule to choose the class taught by a different professor. Mr. Hastings earned an A in the class.

In the NY Post, Cramster.com announces the NYC-area colleges with biggest student membership

OH, U. CHEATERS!

COLUMBIA KIDS SNEAKY SITE'S TOP USERS

Columbia University's walls may be covered with ivy - but its halls are allegedly filled with cheaters.

The people behind a college "study" Web site, where users can pay a $9.95 monthly fee and get all the answers to their homework, said yesterday that they have more users from Columbia than from any other university in the nation.

Cramster.com said it named the prestigious college's student body the No. 1 customer after spotting a high number of users with Columbia e-mail addresses.

"Not only do we have the most users there, but they are the most active," said Aaron Hawker, the site's CEO. Nationally, Columbia bested schools like Ohio State, LSU, the University of Southern California and UCLA to be the top Cramster user.

In the New York area, it leads a list that includes No. 2 SUNY-Stony Brook, No. 3 NYU, No. 4 Yeshiva University and No. 5 St. John's University.

Cramster bills itself as a place where students can participate in an innocent virtual study hall, working out answers online like any dorm-room cram session of old.

But the site contains hundreds of textbooks with answers included. And critics charge that many users simply copy all the information without doing any work.

"I really dislike Cramster.com. Essentially, online study groups are great, but they need to be moderated by the instructor, not convert to a pure copy solutions place, which Cramster is," said SUNY Buffalo Professor Arnd Pralle, a leading opponent of the site.

Yesterday, students at Columbia said using the site wasn't wrong.

"It's not cheating, it's awesome," said Daniel Gray, a 20-year-old major in physics and film. "Those who rely on it [for answers] get screwed. It's to help students who want to learn, and it helped me."

Hawker said that, despite having textbook answers readily available, the site does not condone cheating.