<p>Has anybody actually used Course Hero before? Is it a scam? Or has it been helpful? Is it worth it to pay for a subscription?</p>
<p>A lot of people use Course Hero at Cornell. It’s like an online version of frat test files combined from students at the university and lots of others. Definitely a good way to boost the GPA.</p>
<p>I’m a psych major and Course Hero has been a useful tool this past school year.</p>
<p>I think sites like these help students find different outlets in how to study material more effectively and concise way. Professors want students to learn and perform well, obviously, and collaboration between students can improve learning more efficiently. I think the main objective for a site like Course Hero are for students who want to know how to study effectively, where to concentrate their focus, or how to meet the expectations of a particular professor in a particular course. I believe once students and professors find this common ground, we can only better ourselves as students.</p>
<p>Please do not make the mistake that I made.</p>
<p>After searching the internet for some documents I was brought to course-hero’s website. They claimed to have had the documents I was looking for. All I had to do was to become a member in order to gain access to them. After I paid $59.85 for a membership, I gained access to their members area, and guess what? The documents did not exist!</p>
<p>I thought that maybe this was just my bad luck. I searched for documents from other sections of courses I was taking at my university as well as others, and guess what? The documents listed under just about every course were nothing more than scans of textbook covers, or random documents not even related to the courses. </p>
<p>Some such examples include things like: college application forms, course evaluation forms, financial aid documents, and other random spam documents. After searching for 3 hours I found not one useful document at any university related to the courses I was taking. About half of the documents I clicked on took me to the universities home web page?? Yeah, this is true?? Others pointed to course webpages at a particular department or faculty. This can be achieved by searching in Google. </p>
<p>Course-Hero works in 2 ways:</p>
<ol>
<li>They use software which scrapes the internet for keywords for a course, and then automatically downloads said documents. These could include the most random and irrelevant items that merely contain a course name, code, and university name.</li>
<li>People upload documents into course hero in order to gain access for free (that’s the deal they offer). Guess what? the documents people are uploading could be anything…i.e. virus, stickman drawing, or the lyrics to Gangnam Style.<br></li>
<li>They advertise documents in the non-members area. When you actually sign up, you discover that you have been conned (i.e. the bait and switch). If they allowed you to browse before you buy (even for 3 minutes) then no-one would sign up. They essentially say “Hey, look at all this great stuff we have, but you can’t see it until you pay”. After you pay they say “Oh, sorry about that, we don’t actually have any of the stuff you’re looking for. Nothing we can do, you took the risk, hahahahah”.</li>
</ol>
<p>At the time a filed a report to the BBB. Course-Hero used the excuse that they were not responsible for anything loaded on their servers, and that the disclaim dead links or documents that are no longer available. i.e. you sign up at you’re own risk. </p>
<p>Let me reiterate. Their website is a spam warehouse and they have nothing that Google cannot fetch for you. Please do not waste you’re money and make the mistake I made.</p>
<p>Also, do not pay attention to any of the positive reviews you read about them. They pay people to post comments and responses on forums. See for yourself: if you find a glowing review of Course-Hero on a forum, check the user details and see how long that person has been a member of the forum for (look the other two positive posts above mine. They coincidentally joined this forum at the same time that someone asked a question about Course-Hero. Clearly the marketing guy’s over at Course-Hero).</p>
<p>These guy’s are getting rich at the expense of student’s with little income. Stay away.</p>
Time to resurrect this. I did a google search about course hero, because I was trying to access answers to my sons study guide. (Note to teachers: a study guide works better when a student can check to see if they got the right answer.)
Modnoi above is correct. The posters 1 and 2 only have other posts written about course hero. Glad I read this, because it seems that the site is a scam.