Carleigh McKenna, Class of 2008, said she wishes she knew about cramster.com when she was a student at Penn State.
Now, less than a year later, McKenna works in marketing for the 7-year-old Web site devoted to studying and problem solving. The site sees its highest traffic in April as students rush to prepare for finals, cramster.com co-founder Aaron Hawkey said. Penn State comes in at No. 8 nationwide with 13,848 users, cramster.com spokesman Drew Kerr said.
Cramster.com works as an online study community with questions and answers, as well as step-by-step solutions to odd-numbered problems from hundreds of textbooks. The Web site is free, but paid membership offers solutions to even-numbered problems and allows users to ask five questions a day, whereas the free membership allows one.
"Textbooks only offer you the solution, not how to do the problem," McKenna said.
Still, Hawkey said he values the study community the site offers more than anything else. Cramster offers a community of more than 3,000 experts, Hawkey added.
"People know when they come in that what they are asking is being looked over by experts," Hawkey said.
In college, Hawkey said he realized he needed a community like cramster.com. Hawkey attended the University of California at Los Angeles and had some friends he consistently studied with - until he took a quarter off during his junior year.
"When I came back I didn't have that same group of friends," Hawkey said. "I built a small program that scoured the Internet to find similar content and tons of practice exams. After I graduated, I put that content online."
As the Web site quickly gained popularity, Hawkey discovered a lot of students had the same problem he had, and he wasn't surprised by the demand for practice problems.
"Practice is a big part of study for quantitative subjects," he said.
Andrew Homich (freshman-mechanical engineering) said has appreciated the site's step-by-step solutions not offered in textbooks.
"The textbook just tells you the answer, not how to get to it," Homich said.
