Final-exam.com aims for better test grades for college courses - Brief Article

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Feb, 2000

Guidance Associates (Mount Kisco, NY) has launched Finalexam.com, a site which will begin selling review guides for large courses at colleges and universities in the next month. The web based resources, says publisher Jack Goodman, are closely focused on students' bottom line--getting a better grade. The guides are intended to serve as a supplement to a textbook, or perhaps an additional type of textbook. Individual students can purchase a semester's access for $11.95. More typically, Goodman expects to have professors encourage sales by listing the guides in the syllabus as recommended or required course resources.

While many of the sites selling notes from college classes are coming under fire, Finalexam.com's guides are attracting prestigious professors as authors. Their list of leading textbook authors includes James Brady, professor emeritus of chemistry, Saint John's U, Alan Brinkley, professor of history, Columbia U, David Colander, distinguished professor of economics, Middlebury College, James Gould, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, Princeton U, Jack Peltason, president-emeritus, U of California System, and Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology, Swarthmore College. Goodman says he was able to attract such people by starting with agreements with personal friends from his own academic career at Princeton and Cambridge. Professors work for a fee and for equity in Finalexam.com. Goodman expects to have 10 guides by end of semester and 20 or more by September.

Goodman says reactions vary from the publishers of the well known textbooks by these authors. Some try to come up with a counter offer for their own web product, others have asked about the possibility of Guidance Associates creating guides specific to their textbooks (for now, the guides remain textbook agnostic), and many see no conflict.

In addition to the guides, Finalexam.com supplies free diagnostic tests, and those assessment can direct use of the guides. Professors can customize the guide for their course and add topics, notes and questions. Students also have some tools for customization. Goodman does not plan to add communications features between users, enrichment features or content from other college content providers. These, he says, distract from the focus of improving grades. Students, he points out, really just want to know information that they will be tested on.

Final-exam.com represents Guidance Associates first foray into higher education markets for a long while. The company started off with college recruiting films in the sixties, and then made slideshows through the Center for Humanities. Various media projects then focused on K-12 markets. Brother Jack and Will Goodman now run their father's company. They created an earlier web venture, NetGuider.com, which offers Internet tours for specific school topics such as "Mark Twain and the Art of the Novel" or "Getting a Job in the Real World." Goodman says K-12 connectivity did not turn out to be what they had hoped for, and they decided to work in the more deeply wired higher education environment. The four NetGuider titles are still sold, but, Goodman says all efforts for new development have gone into Finalexam.com for the past year.

Asked why a textbook is not enough, Goodman says that, besides a general dislike of textbooks, today's students are not as willing or able to learn in a linear fashion. They are more able to learn in contextual and hyperlinked work of the web, says Goodman.