| Website | koofers.com |
| Category | Web |
| Phone | 540-818-8817 |
| Employees | 3 |
Koofers.com provides an interactive community that serves the academic needs of college students through information sharing. Students benefit from collaboration with their peers and the experiences of former students. Many helpful services span the entire academic calendar from course selection through final exams, and include collaborative note taking, course & instructor ratings/grade distributions, and an online library for sharing past exams & study materials.
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Koofers - where were you when I was in school? Koofers started at Virginia Tech, with a campus rollout in 2007. In that one year, it became the third-most visited site by students, behind Facebook and MySpace. The reason? It allows students to make the relatively opaque process of class and teacher selection fully transparent, by providing grade distributions and teacher feedback to allow a student to shape their individual class schedule, based on their own needs and style (e.g., “I am fine with exams, but I hate teachers who give tons of quizzes”).
Once a student has started the semester, Koofers provides help by offering access to a collective repository of study guides, past exams, etc. This is something schools have had for over a century, but these vaults were only available to small groups of students (e.g., a fraternity). Now, those tools are available to all students. Koofers also supports ongoing communication between students and teachers through its community tools.
The reaction at its alpha deployment at Virginia Tech, coupled with positive feedback this Spring from a quick pilot during the last week of the term at the University of Maryland (where 1000+ users signed up), gives the Koofers team confidence that they have a winner here.
Koofers will deploy to 30+ schools this Fall 2008, to provide themselves a bigger test bed, and then look to launch more broadly in the Spring.
By combining an extensive amount of academic information directly from university records along with social networking data, Koofers.com gives you virtual snapshots of classes and how specific professors teach them.
View the current and past grade breakdown and average GPA for Every Course, Every Professor, Every Department.
See the official grade reports for all professors, courses, and departments in your university.
| Website | koofers.com |
Unique to Virginia Tech is the word “coofer” that was coined in the early 1940s to refer to tests or homework completed in an earlier course that is available to students taking the course later, and used as a means of studying or preparing. The term originated at Bluefield College, a former extension branch of VPI, and is likely derived from the word “coffer” (synonym for a strongbox). A student from Bluefield College transferred to the Virginia Tech - Blacksburg campus and first introduced the term. It is often used as a verb in such constructions as “to coofer a problem,” also sometimes spelled “koofer.”
Koofers.com takes it a step further and re-brands “Koofers” as any historical information or data that can help you with your classes (i.e. exams, study guides, ratings, grade distributions, etc.)
