About CourseSpy

Hey there!
Welcome to CourseSpy.

We are a small team of students from across New Zealand, and we're glad you stumbled across our project.


Exploring CourseSpy for the first time? Here's a quick rundown of what we're all about:
Honest reviews
Easy course planning
Powerful tools


... and more to come in future!


a big
 THANK YOU
 
to all of the students who have contributed to CourseSpy.

Along the CourseSpy journey, you've contributed thousands of course reviews, invaluable feedback on features & design, and helped us to better inform and equip other students to succeed!

We've been lucky enough to pick up a few awards along the way!





CourseSpy Partners
We work with some cool people to make CourseSpy more useful to students! This includes things like recommending tutors, helping you find the best learning resources, getting the data we need to make CourseSpy better, and more.

If you're interested in partnering with us, please get in touch! We're always looking for new ways to help students succeed. If you are part of a student association, a tutoring company, or just have a great idea, let use know! Over 9,000 individual kiwi students use CourseSpy each year, and they've visited the site more than 240,000 times in the last 12 months. We're growing fast, and we'd love to work with you to help students succeed.


Want to get in touch?
Contact me (Joey) at [email protected]  or chuck us a message in the box below!

Want to support CourseSpy?
Contribute to the future of CourseSpy!
CourseSpy is a free service, and we want to keep it that way. We're a small team of students, and we're passionate about making CourseSpy the best it can be. If you've found CourseSpy useful and would like to support us, you can donate via the button below. All donations go towards the running costs of CourseSpy. Also, if you're interested in joining the team, please get in touch (see above)! We're looking for people to help with development of future features as well as marketing and outreach.



CourseSpy Scores
This section is kinda boring but if you like numbers, here ya go!
We wanted a system that you could use to compare two papers and quickly see which one is the better option. Initially, we started by just adding together the average rating and difficulty. However, this was not perfect, as it meant that a paper with one five star review would appear higher in the rankings than a paper with 20 reviews averaging 4.9 stars (which is likely the better paper if so many people are raving about it!). So, we came up with a new system that weights the scores compared to the average rating on CourseSpy and then scales each paper against that. It essentially takes into account the difficulty and rating of the paper as well as how many reviews the paper has. If lots of people have reviewed the paper, the score is closer to the ratings students have given it. If the paper only has a few reviews, the weighting system will bring the score closer to the predicted average score as the true score is not yet known. Lost you yet? Well here's the formula for it:
(((0.5 * 5 + (Average Rating + (6 – Average Difficulty)) * Number of Reviews) / (0.5 + Number of Reviews)- 1) / (10 - 1)) * 100
To see the top 10 papers ranked by this system, click the button!

Rankings
If you're a talented mathematician and you've got a better (or more simple!) way of doing this, please get in touch. I never want to have to touch this formula again.



T&Cs
Some legal things!
If you want to know our policies regarding user data, and terms and conditions of using CourseSpy, click the button below. It's all pretty standard, but it's important to know what you're getting into.

Terms and Conditions