Tell me if this sounds familiar
You just started a new semester, and you made a resolution to become the greatest academic weapon to ever grace your campus. For your five courses, you go to every lecture, attend office hours twice a week, and spend three hours grinding problem sets every day (including weekends). You start studying for midterms not one, not two, but three weeks in advance.
For finals, you pull out all the stops. In the 10-person group chat that you created at the beginning of the semester, you broadcast which library you'll imperialize until the exam; you religiously arrive at 8am sharp each mourning morning to claim your rightful territory.
After the exam, you're drained. Sure, some of the questions were rough, but everyone else supposedly thought so too. For the next 2-3 weeks, while the professor practices writing the alphabet, you pray for the juiciest, thickest curve to keep your future intact. After little Billy posts on the class forum for the 50th time, "hi professor 🤓, when will grades be released?" - the professor finally caves.
Congrats on getting the median!
Stage 2: Self-Reflection
First, the imposter syndrome kicks in:
"Am I stupid?"
"Maybe I don't belong here..."
Then, you do a thorough investigation. You find that your friends got around similar scores as well, despite everyone neglecting their social life the past three weeks. You contemplate whether the next logical step is to shitpost on the class forum about how unfair the exam was email the professor. Upon looking at the grade distribution, more students got A's than students who showed up to class. You didn't even realize there were this many students in the class!
The secret that every student knows, but no professor will fix
Here's what the rich (literally) don't want you to know:
For the past decades, likely since the advent of the hard drive, the wealthy sororities/fraternities have exploited this principle, by accumulating test banks. Reason being: if someone has already taken a course, you can skip the trial and error by simply studying their old material. Sometimes, prospects are more incentivized to join these organizations for the test banks rather than the social aspect (tag that one try-hard).
You're probably wondering if I'm accusing students of cheating.
No, of course not. I'm simply confirming that this happens. It's pretty clever (nonetheless, unfair) if you ask me.
Don't believe me? See for yourself.
To play devil's advocate for a bit, I admit that coming up with new material every semester is difficult - it's not an easy job. However, it is a doable job, that should be more achievable if you're getting paid $100k+ to do it.
Some of the best professors in the world create new tests every semester because they genuinely want to educate - that's the way it should be. But for the vast majority of professors, they're just trying to focus on their research🤓.
Objective unfairness
I want to assert that professors releasing solutions and exams, without the intention of changing them, inevitably disadvantages students who plan to take future offerings. The disparity begins when students with special connections (mostly through the privilege of affording a sorority/fraternity) obtain access to these test banks.
Now, any student will tell you that having last semester's material is a huge advantage because it saves you precious time (so you can focus on actually studying for the exam). Ideally, all past offerings should be available to everyone. Unfortunately, test bank dissemination remains clandestine, since fear of academic integrity violations deters its proliferation to the general student body. This is where the inequality lies, eroding the meritocracy that higher education is supposed to be.
The fix
The fix is simple: democratize the test banks. How could we achieve this?
Don't Chegg and Course Hero already do this? Yes, but they're not perfect.
Here's why...
Chegg
If universities request an investigation, Chegg sells its students out.
Chegg answers aren't always correct (their experts may not have answered them the way your professor wanted)
Course Hero
Course Hero materials are usually outdated by 5-6 years.
They incentivize students to upload lots of their course material by disproportionately rewarding them with a few credits, thus polluting the overall ecosystem and making it difficult to find what you need
Most of all, neither platform allows you to make money. What if we could have a platform that:
Does not sell out their students
Offers the most up-to-date, high quality materials from previous semesters
Allows students to quickly/easily find what they need
Allows students to make money
Sounds like a dream, right?