Web Site Offers GPA Statistics

By Alex Kohut

Students across the country now have another source of assistance in the class selection process.

CampusBuddy offers online access to over 80 million official grades at hundreds of college campuses nationwide.

The site features the complied grades from college classrooms displayed as percentages under the name of each listed professor or department.

For instance, the average grade point average in SVSU’s English department is 2.84.

But unlike similar sites, CampusBuddy blends the academic side of college life with the social aspect.

With the Web site’s Facebook application, students can securely log in at CampusBuddy and network with college students.

“We’re reconstructing the social fabric of school,” says CampusBuddy creator Mike Moradian.

Moradian, a 2007 University of California-Los Angeles graduate, says the site is similar to the Facebook of several years ago, when it was strictly a college network.

Although the social element is one of the site’s main draws, Moradian and his staff of 12 have spent more than three years obtaining and compiling the official grades from colleges across the country.

Originally available only to California college students, CampusBuddy expanded its grade retrievals to include colleges in other states.

“We saw how taken students were by the site, and we made up our mind to push and make it available to everyone,” Moradian said.

CampusBuddy now offers grades from about 250 colleges, though Moradian says the site’s network is set up for 6,000 schools.

Moradian admits the decision to gather grades from colleges nationwide has severely increased the workload for the site’s staff.

“There’s a legal process we need to go through to get grades from the schools each time, which makes it difficult,” he said. “Some schools are more cooperative than others, but it’s still tough because the legal statures are different from state-to-state.”

The grade distributions on CampusBuddy are updated each semester, which means the retrieval of grades is an ongoing process.

Moradian says a lack of transparency in grading led to his creation of CampusBuddy.

“You might need to take the same econ class, but it’s three times more difficult with one professor than with another,” he said.

Even though the Web site offers the grade distributions for each department and professor, Moradian says the main purpose of this information is to help students find the best professors for them.

The site offers statistics such as school grade point average, percentage of students with a B or higher, and percentage of students with a C- or lower.

SVSU’s current grade point average is 3.00. Sixty-seven percent of its students received greater than or equal to a B, while 11 percent received non-passing grades.

CampusBuddy calculated these numbers based on the grade analysis of 3,992 classes and 90,661 grades.

In a growing pool of sites designed to disclose grading and teaching patterns of college professors, CampusBuddy is able to distinguish itself.

Though the site encourages user feedback on classes and professors, its sharing of official grade distributions ensures a mix of fact and opinion.

“Sites like Ratemyprofessor.com have a platform that’s more geared toward ranting and raving,” Moradian said. “It’s more emotion-based and doesn’t give you an idea of the class dynamic.”

Despite CampusBuddy’s format, some professors warn against making serious class decisions based on such Web sites’ information.

“If you read the fine print on these sites, you'll notice that they usually say quite directly that they make no warranties about their claims,” English professor Eric Gardner said.

Gardner says he is also skeptical about such sites because they are dot-coms.

“Dot-coms exist to make money for their owners, either through advertising revenues or other fees or both, not to help students,” he said.

Moradian objects to that notion.

“Not all dot-coms have the sole focus of making money,” he said. “We’ve invested a lot to create this service for students, and we’re working to keep the site free.”

As the site continues to grow, Moradian says the staff’s focus is on building its student base.

The CampusBuddy staff has created a better awareness of the service through advertising on sites like Facebook.

CampusBuddy is also a venue for high school and college internships. Moradian is currently searching for interns to assume marketing and design roles for the site.

With the site’s growth, Moradian says he’s received mostly positive feedback.

“I spoke with a professor in Wisconsin who thinks the site’s format is helpful for the students,” he said. “He told me he believes making the grades available to the public is going to make students work harder.”