Preparing for entrance examinations can be an arduous and long struggle. As tutorial centres and institutes keep mushrooming and students make a beeline for various cities that have emerged as test-prep hubs, there is a section of students that finds it difficult to relocate to these cities and prepare for the entrance examinations.
Aiming to help such students and provide e-learning content to aspirants, test preparatory portal SuperProfs brings online classes for tests in IIT-JEE, UPSC, GATE, etc. Available as a website (www.superprofs.com), it is also available as a mobile application on the Android platform which is being accessed by four lakh users across 600 cities and towns.
Talking about the endeavour, founder and CEO of SuperProfs Piyush Agrawal said most of the study content at the portal can be availed free of cost. “Many students shift to cities like Kota, Delhi and Chennai to prepare for entrance tests as these places have a host of tutorial centres. Many students, those belonging to tier-2 cities or belonging to economically weaker families cannot afford to do so. SuperProfs aims at helping such students as we upload videos of study sessions for the entrance tests which can be viewed at the convenience of the student in the comforts of his/her home. This is a much better approach than tutorial classes as these lessons can be paused and watched as many times as he/she needs,” Agrawal said.
Although the concept of e-learning is catching up in India, Agrawal says it was initially viewed with scepticism as there are no traditional means of studying physically with a teacher. However, students soon realised that studying online was a convenient and economical option. Such is the popularity of e-learning now that about 70 per cent of the traffic in the app version of SuperProfs comes from Tier 2 cities.
Besides recorded videos of classes, the portal has discussion forums and weekly live seminars (available on the app version) through which students can clear their doubts.
In order to maintain the teaching quality, the portal makes sure that the best teachers are selected for the classes. “We make sure that a teacher should have taught at least 10,000 students and maintain a strict evaluation procedure for teachers. The syllabus of what the teachers will be teaching is also kept under supervision. Currently, we have a team of 160 teachers, including 40 dedicated teachers from Delhi for UPSC aspirants. Each of the teachers have a good review,” head of UPSC classes Nagendra Pratap said.
ScholarshipIn addition, SuperProfs has a scholarship scheme for students which offers 100 per cent scholarship to the first five students who top the scholarship test.
“There are several cases where meritorious students lose out on an opportunity to enrol in test centres due to paucity of funds. The cost of preparing for government jobs can be high. Our scholarship will help such students as there are several categories of scholarship amounts to be availed of,” Agrawal said.
Scheduled for January 16, 24 and 31, the online test will be a two-hour test and will be open throughout the day. Results will be announced the next day. Tutorial fees for the first five top students will get a 100 per cent scholarship, while 75 per cent of the fees will be waived off for the next 100 students. Fifty per cent of the fees will be waived off for up to 500 students.
