Every college student has been there: trying to read chapters one through 27 at 11 p.m. the night before a midterm exam or starting a paper at midnight mere hours before it is due. The next day, the test is taken, the paper handed in and the information forgotten, laid to rest with the rest of the material temporarily learned while cramming. Looking to transform the way students across the country are studying, three Brandeis graduate students set out to change this system.

Josh Silverman, Jason Urton and Bill DeRusha, who are all currently on leaves of absence from the Master's program in Computer Science, began their process after realizing that students in all parts of the world have the same problem with studying. The three created StudyEgg, a website designed to better organize course material and prepare students for exams by asking online questions varying in degree of difficulty based on a student's answers to previous ones.

"The idea really arose out of personal needs as a student, trying to keep track of a ton of information and review it effectively for a test. That is a really hard thing to do well as a student," said co-founder and CEO Josh Silverman in an interview with the Justice.

"There's such a volume when you consider all the chapters that you read, ... all the extra resources that are provided. ... The motivation was really tools to help students manage that enormous quantity of information," he explained.

StudyEgg is organized by textbook so that it stays applicable to thousands of students across the country. "If we do a class, it has a much smaller range of applicability. It might not even work across semesters," Silverman explained.

Students can search the textbook they are using for a class to find notes and review questions that pertain to the material included in the course readings. The website currently has about three subjects and will continue to grow with the users.

The University has played a major part in funding the group and developing StudyEgg. "Our first funding came through Brandeis. It was called the Brandeis Sprout Grant. That's been a very helpful grant for us. It's helped us cover our technology costs, like running our servers [and] paying for all the other technology expenses we have," Silverman said. At the start of the project, the creators already had 1,000 people signed up on the website.

"We're pretty pleased with our pilots. We are rapidly developing a product and incorporating customer feedback," Silverman said.

While students initially used StudyEgg in various classrooms across the country, Silverman said it did not exactly meet student needs because the initial software was "a little buggy." It did receive publicity, however, through about a dozen blogs that boasted the new website. They spent the second half of their spring 2011 semester figuring out what students preferred through surveys and interviews.

Currently, the website allows students to register for an account that allows them to add "eggs" that correspond to a textbook and ask a certain number of review questions from the text. At the end of the question set, a pie chart shows the number answered correctly and incorrectly. This, however, is not the developers' only goal.

StudyEgg's next step will follow what is called adaptive testing and adaptive learning. "We ask you a question and the next question is determined by your response to the previous question, so if you got something right, then you'll get a harder question on that same subject," Silverman said.

"Once you've mastered that subject, you'll move on to the next topic. If you get it wrong, then there will be supporting information followed by supporting questions, and then that very question will reappear," he explained.

Silverman believes that adaptive learning saves students an extraordinary amount of time. "You don't have to keep track of what you know and don't know. StudyEgg keeps track of that all for you and makes sure that you're reviewing it effectively," he explained.

Silverman did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, studying political science and french. After graduating, he taught information technology and English Language Arts to fifth graders in Seoul, South Korea.

"It was during that period of time where I started to develop learning tools for myself and also for my students to see in what ways I could help them out," he said. "I was teaching a class of students with very different levels of English. It was an international school, so theoretically they all were proficient in English, but that wasn't always the case, so there was a huge variation," he explained.

"I was looking for ways to differentiate the curriculum to really individualize instruction based on individual needs. So that was what spurred a lot of my own dabbling in this [project]."

He then took a year off to work on the prototype for StudyEgg. This is when he realized he needed partners to continue his work and that, though he loved teaching, he was more interested in educational technology. He made the transition to Brandeis not only for its Computer Science department but also "to find partners and hit the reset button on the whole project and look for new ways, new innovations to individualize instruction."

That's when he met Urton and DeRusha, both studying Computer Science in the IT Entrepreneurship program. Silverman was doing a post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science, but they began development of StudyEgg in late December of this past winter.

"We worked pretty feverishly throughout the spring semester, both with a full load of classes and ... a full work week, also," Silverman said. Although Silverman, Urton and DeRusha are now on leaves of absence from the University, Silverman does believe they will return to Brandeis to finish their graduate work.

"It's really about what students want to use, and we're just going to keep testing products and putting them in students' hands until we get a really great fit," he said.