Koofers

» see koofers.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every university runs on old exams. Where I studied, in Turkey across the 2000s, they moved by hand: a folder somebody's older brother had kept, a photocopy of a photocopy with answers penciled into the margin, handed over in a corridor the week before a final. It worked and it worked badly, because whether you got the folder came down to who you happened to know.

Koofers was the American attempt to put that on a server. The word is Virginia Tech slang for a past paper passed down to whoever takes the course next year, and three people from that campus started building the site version of it in 2006: Michael Rihani and Patrick Gartlan while they were students, with the alumnus Glynn LoPresti. It launched in the fall of 2008 and ran out of Reston, Virginia.

What it grew into was bigger than an exam locker. Professor ratings on a five-star scale, grade distribution histories so you could see how an instructor actually marked, a shared library of course material, flashcards and a textbook price comparison all sat on the same account. By the end it claimed more than two million registered users and around 350,000 shared documents.

In 2019 the Italian entrepreneur Riccardo Ocleppo bought it and merged it into Docsity, his own student document platform out of Turin. The site kept running under its own name for another year. Somewhere in the third week of January 2021 it stopped: koofers.com was still serving Koofers on the 13th and was answering with a redirect to docsity.com by the 24th. It still answers that way today.

~ the dossier ~

~ what a koofer is ~

A koofer is an exam that has already been sat, sitting in the hands of somebody who has not sat it. Virginia Tech has had the word for a long time and the behavior it describes is universal, which is exactly what made it a business rather than a campus utility. The word was local. The habit was everywhere.

The legal footing was always uncomfortable. A professor who reuses questions has a problem the moment the question bank becomes searchable, and the defense this whole category made was that the students with access to the folder already had the advantage and the site was handing it to everybody else. Universities stayed split on that argument for the entire time Koofers ran, which is why the site spent a decade being simultaneously indispensable and slightly disreputable.

~ the five million ~

In 2010 Koofers raised five million dollars in a round led by Revolution. Revolution is Steve Case's venture firm, so the money behind a college exam database traces directly back to the person who co-founded AOL, which is a longer arc through this website than most graves manage.

Five million dollars in 2010 bought a long runway and did not buy a large exit. The site never reached the scale of the textbook and homework-help companies sitting alongside it, and when it sold in 2019 the buyer was a Turin startup with the same idea and a European user base rather than an American education group.

~ the eleven-month gap ~

Docsity published a blog post welcoming Koofers users on 16 December 2021. "Starting today we will be one big community!" it read, explaining that the old logins still worked and that the flashcards had become a feature called Quiz. The archive says koofers.com had already stopped being Koofers eleven months before that post went up.

That gap is the most honest thing in the story. The domain flipped in January, the announcement arrived in December, and in between sat a stretch where two million people's accounts lived on a website that had quietly turned into a different website. Nothing was being hidden. It is just what retiring a brand looks like when there is nobody left on the payroll whose job is to announce it.

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