After experiencing a particularly rough time in a calculus class during his sophomore year at UCLA, Mike Moradian began to think students could benefit from knowing more about how professors grade.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the business economics major got information about grade distributions at classes at the public university. That data became the basis for CampusBuddy, the business he launched in February 2008. Moradian aggregated public data on grade distributions for classes, professors, and majors at 250 public colleges, starting with the University of California system. The service has 280,000 active monthly users out of the nearly 1 million people who have joined, most through its facebook app.
Business Features:
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the business economics major got information about grade distributions at classes at the public university. That data became the basis for CampusBuddy, the business he launched in February 2008. Moradian aggregated public data on grade distributions for classes, professors, and majors at 250 public colleges, starting with the University of California system. The service has 280,000 active monthly users out of the nearly 1 million people who have joined, most through its facebook app.
Business Features:
Official Grade Distribution
One key differentiators of CampusBuddy is the website's extensive database of official grade distributions, totaling more than 80 million student grades at approximately 250 U.S. and Canadian Colleges. Viewing grade histories for classes and professor provides an objective view of how difficult a prospective class or professor may be.Official grade distributions have long been of interest to the student population, but due to the significant efforts needed to request, gather, and organize such official data from universities, such a database has never been created to this scale.
Ratings and Reviews
Students on CampusBuddy can also write reviews of professors, academic departments, and their school in general. Rating categories aim to capture meaningful data from the users. For example, professor review categories include; Effectiveness, Difficulty, Concern for Student Learning, Fairness, and Availability outside of class.
University Pages
Campus Pages are the home pages for each school on CampusBuddy. The pages allow students to see students who attend the school, photos, school grading and admission statistic, a Question-and-Answer board for the campus, among other items. University pages are composed of official statistics and user-submitted data, however CampusBuddy allows universities to verify and run their own pages as well.
Moradian says a "small percentage" of active users pay $1.50 monthly for access to detailed grading data. The site also makes money by referring students to such services as textbook sellers and moving companies and through advertising. CampusBuddy employs 100 interns who work remotely for school credit and maintains a staff of five at its Beverly Hills office.
