Cramster craze hits campuses

Libraries, flash cards and Adderall are just a few of the things that UB students have used to help aid their studying experiences.

Cramster.com can now be added to that list, too.

Over 6,200 registered users on this online study community are posting and answering questions that come up while studying. UB ranks on the top of all New York State schools in terms of students registered on the site, outpacing both Columbia University and Syracuse University.

Rob Angarita, president and co-founder of Cramster.com, attributes the high amount of UB students using the Web site to word-of-mouth communication.

"You get clusters of people who find it on Google," Angarita said. "Some other people might discover it in a class. It's hard to predict - it just kind of happens organically."

Cramster.com is an online study community designed to let users post questions that they may have while doing homework assignments or studying. Other users can then view these questions and share their answers.

Other features on Cramster include solutions to textbook problems, practice quizzes and note sharing.

"You take notes or have a handout and you're seeing more and more of things where students are saying, 'We have this content. Where do we upload it?'" Angarita said. "We're starting to separate content that is uploaded by educators and students. We even have students finding Web sites that they find useful and that they want to share."

Eric Jongsma, a sophomore mechanical engineering major, mainly uses Cramster for the practice problems.

"I'm in engineering, so it's a lot of technical and math questions," Jongsma said. "The way I learn best is by doing a lot of problems. I can do a problem on Cramster and look up the answer. I use it as more of a study tool. I didn't study as good last year because I didn't have the answers to the problems, and Cramster lets me check that."

Most Cramster users are engineering, math and other science majors like Jongsma. Angarita plans on expanding to cover more subjects, such as the arts, humanities and business, but still sees engineering and the sciences as the sources for the bulk of the demand for the Web site.

"With business, we just launched our Q&A board for it," Angarita said. "We've got thousands and thousands of students and educators involved in the sciences. It's rare to see that scene overtake business classes. [At] the same time, we need to bring more content on those things such as accounting and finance. It'll get there, though. The same students need help."

Jongsma first heard about Cramster through word-of-mouth and continued to facilitate knowledge of the Web site's existence through the same mode.

"I have a small group of people I work with and they didn't know about it, and then I found out about it during one of my summer classes and told them," Jongsma said. "I told maybe half a dozen people and they found it very useful."

College students comprise the vast majority of Cramster's user base. According to Angarita, about 15 percent of the site's users are high school students, while educators comprise between 2 and 3 percent of the users, with the remainder being university students.

With the low amount of educators using Cramster, Angarita noted that the Web site has made an extra effort to invite more educators to use it since September 2008 as well as taken an additional step to help identify educators on Cramster.

"We're trying to share things that are educational to post there," Angarita said. "We need to make a couple changes for people in terms of comments, but the inception has been very warm... One of the things we do for educators is they can sign up with their school email address and link it to their site and verify that he's an educator."

However, not all educators are open to the product that Cramster provides to its users. Arnd Pralle, assistant professor of physics, sees Cramster as a Web site that is not very beneficial to a student's learning experience, as it is primarily used for just giving answers out and could be an avenue for cheating.

Pralle feels that online discussion boards that classes offer on UBLearns are better alternatives for students to utilize, especially because students know who they are specifically receiving help from.

"We monitor [the boards]," Pralle said. "We have someone doing it every 24 hours or more often than that. We don't provide the answer, but we explain how to do [the problem]."

Angarita stated that users have the ability to check another user's prior answering of questions on Cramster to see how trustworthy their answer may be.

"If a student is helping you, you may ask, 'How do I know this student's work is correct?'" Angarita said. "It works a bit like eBay in that you can see their history, how they've been helping others."

Regardless, Pralle foresees online study groups like Cramster eventually leading to changes in how homework is administered.

"We are now monitoring more the homework we give out," Pralle said. "Rather than using the textbooks, we may have to end up making all our homework ourselves or make our tests worth more points."