Israeli app tips off college kids about bad courses

An Israeli student website has released an app that it says will give students the information they need to make better decisions on courses and professors that are right for them.

GradeBack, a new mobile iPhone and Android app created by cloud-based studying site Cloudents, lets students evaluate and comment on their professors’ performance, featuring answers to “questions students most want answers to, everything ranging from how difficult they are to the course load,” the app’s makers said.

With GradeBack, students are shown the professors that they are most likely to need information on, using data based on their Facebook relationships. The app identifies the university a student attends and professors most likely to be relevant to them (the database includes over 1.5 million university and college professors at schools around the world). Users can anonymously grade professors’ performance on a number of factors, such as how hard a course is, how often is attendance taken, and how heavy the course load is (how many tests, how much homework, etc.).

“Rather than wasting time and energy seeking out the advice of other students who took the classes before, with GradeBack you have instant reviews in the palm of your hand that can save you lots of potential aggravation later,” according to Cloudents CEO Eidan Apelbaum.

There are already several anonymous sites where students can give their evaluations of professors and lecturers, the biggest being Rate My Professor and Koofers. Many schools have their own Student Instructional Rating Systems, where students can give their two cents about professors’ performance. GradeBack, however, is the only mobile app, as opposed to the other services’ web sites, that enables students to provide ratings – an innovation that puts it a step ahead of other sites, according to Cloudents.

While a large number of scholarly articles have appeared in recent years about how “effective” student ratings are – how seriously they should be taken, and whether they really improve the educational process or impede it – GradeBack and the other sites don’t seem to be focused on improving the college experience, but rather improving the life of students.

Students are sometimes required to take a “core curriculum” course that has nothing to do with their interests or their major. Faced with that dilemma, many probably try to find the easiest course – with the least amount of work, and the teacher that tends to the higher end of the bell curve. For them, said Apelbaum, GradeBack will come in very handy.

Rehovot-based Cloudents itself aims to make college life easier for students by providing them with a crowdsourced location for what it calls “social studying.” Students add files, tests, comments, reports, and other items that could help others, and review what others who have taken their course before have had to deal with. The system, the company says, “helps students become better students.” It already covers most Israeli universities, with European schools next in line, Apelbaum said.

Cloudent raised $1 million in funding from Benson Oak Capital, which invests in early and growth-stage companies in the Czech Republic and Israel.

For students, the bottom line is really the bottom line – what they are getting for their money, and how to get what they want and need out of their college education, said Apelbaum.

“GradeBack is a truly interactive app that provides students with a sincere, real-time, and accurate peer evaluation of the lecturers’ classes they attend or consider registering for,” Apelbaum said. “By using the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ GradeBack provides students a better way to find the best classes for them by seeing what their classmates really think. It’s about students helping each other in a meaningful, yet fun way.”