CampusBuddy
CampusBuddy is an education-focused social web service that allows students see classmates online, share professor reviews, and access official school statistics. Regarding official statistics, CampusBuddy has an official grade database of over 80 million grades from 250 universities. This is considered a valuable resource by many students, as it allows students to get an objective idea of the difficulty of certain professors and courses before enrolling.
The website was launched in February 2008, by Mike Moradian, a UCLA alumni. Originally, it served as an academic service at 44 colleges within California, but has since expanded to include more than 5,000 colleges and 50,000 high school networks.[1]
The mission of CampusBuddy is to build a cohesive college networking platform, making the education process more public, transparent and accessible.[2]
Features
Official grade distributions
One key differentiator 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.[3] Viewing grade histories for classes and professor provides an objective view of how difficult a prospective class or professor may be.[4] 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. [5]
Ratings and reviews
Students on CampusBuddy can also write reviews of professors, academic departments, and their school in general.[6] Rating categories aim to capture meaningful data from the users.[7] For example, professor review categories include; Effectiveness, Difficulty, Concern for Student Learning, Fairness, and Availability outside of class.[8]
Facebook integration
CampusBuddy is a verified app on Facebook. The CampusBuddy service is tightly integrated with the Facebook platform.[9] Users can log in on the CampusBuddy.com website using Facebook or can log in on Facebook using the CampusBuddy application. CampusBuddy lets students share their classes and weekly schedules with friends within their Facebook profiles. Adding a CampusBuddy tab to the user's Facebook profile lets them easily share classes with their friends. For prospective college students, CampusBuddy has admissions information and school profiles for over 3,000 colleges.
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.
Social coupons
Campusbuddy.com offers coupon deals on goods and services, similar to what Groupon and other discount coupon services offer, for email recipients with .edu email addresses.
References
- ↑ "reveals grades by professors". Dailybruin.ucla.edu. Retrieved 2012-11-27.
- ↑ Jennifer Van Grove 62 (2009-03-25). "CampusBuddy Connects Students and Universities Through Social Media - Mashable 25 March 2009". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2012-11-27.
- ↑ Friday, October 17th, 2008 (2008-10-17). "CampusBuddy Hands Over Campus Grading Records To Students - TechCrunch 17 October 2008". Techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2012-11-27.
- ↑ Professors Reveal Official Grading Histories - New University, UC Irvine 25 February 2008
- ↑ Schratz, Allie (2008-03-03). "Campus Buddy dishes out the grades on SF State - New York Times 3 March 2008". Xpress.sfsu.edu. Retrieved 2012-11-27.
- ↑ New ‘Buddy’ System Helps Students Choose Classes - City on a Hill Press, UCSC 12 April 2008
- ↑ New Website Offers Professor, Course Ratings,” - The Guardian, UCSD 21 February 2008
- ↑ New Web Site Evaluates Professors - Daily Aztec, San Diego State University 28 February 2008
- ↑ Josh Catone 402 (2009-07-20). "10 Ways to Use Social Media to Pick a College - Mashable 20 July 2009". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2012-11-27.