The Student Room

The Student Room (often abbreviated to TSR), established in 1999, is a United Kingdom based community and social learning website for school and university students. It claims to be the no.1 UK education site according to Comscore[2] media metrix web statistics.[3]

It connects students with other students so that they can make more informed education choices, get help with their studies, and get support with student life.

As of January 2014, the site has over 1.35 million members and 45 million posts, and gets over 6.5 Million visitors per month.[4]

In May 2013 the site incorporated versions of sites MarkedbyTeachers.com and GetRevising.co.uk to form a new social learning section called Learn Together.[5]

The website is known to have over-zealous moderators, with a large percentage of user posts being censored and accounts banned frequently.

www.markedbyteachers.com uses selected examples of real student work to help students learn. It has 150,000+ pieces of work written by UK students,[6] of which many are also critiqued by UK teachers or peer reviewed by students.[7]

www.getrevising.co.uk contains a broad range of supplementary social learning tools including flashcards, quizzes, word searches, mindmaps, crosswords, revision notes, quiz searches and revision cards. Students create their own resources which they can then share with peers.[8]

Get Revising is also home to a study planner & revision timetable creator.[8]

• announced as one of 3 winners in the Edtech20 Awards announced at the 2014 Edtech Europe conference. This recognises the company as being in the top 3 most innovative and fastest growing Edtech companies in Europe.[9]
• winner of the Fastest Growing Business Award at the Brighton & Hove Business Awards in 2013.[10]
• 4 Lovies Awards in 2013 for Best Community Site & Best Youth Site awarded by the judges, and the same 2 categories as voted by web users across Europe.[11]
• Official Honoree for Social Media Websites at the Webbys[12]
• medical forums voted Best on the Web by medicalnoises.com [13]
• INTO's Most Innovative and Useful Site for Students in 2013[14]
• Ernst & Young short-listed for ‘Best use of Social Media Platform’ for graduate recruitment campaign [15]
• GetRevising.co.uk - Hi5 eLearning award from UK government funded Joint Information Systems Committee n.[16]
• GetRevising.co.uk - finalist in the 2010 BETT Awards in the category for Best Tools for Learning and Teaching[17]
• GetRevising.co.uk -Silver Award for Most Dramatic Business Impact at the Which Test Won 2014 Online Testing Awards.[18]

The Student Room Group has a range of high-profile partnerships in the student information space.

• In 2009 they partnered with the UK Government Department for Innovation Universities and Skills[19] (now DBIS - the Department of Business Innovation & Skills)to provide university information for Mature Students.
• For several years The Student Room have partnered with UCAS[20] to ensure that the moderators on The Student Room are formally trained up as UCAS Advisers, and duly supported by UCAS to ensure they provide high quality advice - particularly during the university Clearing process.
• The Student Loans Company (part of Student Finance England) partner with The Student Room[21] to ensure that UK students receive the highest quality and most timely advice directly within their own community on The Student Room.

The Student Room Group is run by Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Newson (who is also the largest shareholder).[22]

There are around 70 employees based out of their Brighton office.

The Student Room sites are also run by a team of volunteers and helpers, including: Volunteer Section Leaders, Volunteer Team Members, Forum Helpers, Personal Statement Helpers, CV Helpers & Peer Support Volunteers.[23] Volunteers used to be entitled "Moderators", but have since had moderation responsibility of forum posts decreased from the role to be coordinated instead by a paid out of hours moderation team.

The forum was created in around 2001 under the name "UK Learning" as a site for students at university to talk to each other. Since then the forum has grown in popularity and developed into a forum consisting of dozens of sub-forums and thousands of new posts daily. In late 2004 the forum saw a change to its present name of "The Student Room".

UK Learning was originally a portal site, the purpose of which was to push traffic towards profit-oriented sites offering various educational resources such as sample coursework, essays and personal statements. The remainder of the site was a vBulletin-based discussion forum, most of the content of which was derived from usenet posts to which users of the forum could respond through the forum rather than via a usenet client, which enabled the site to rapidly build content (and thus search engine driven traffic) while having only a small user base.

Thus, UK Learning/The Student Room has never been a profit-oriented site in itself, though as noted above it does attempt to generate income in the form of optional subscriptions paid by users of the site, advertising banners and voluntary donations from users as a means to offset the large running costs of the site. The connection to the aforementioned profit-oriented sites can still be seen on The Student Room but are no longer the focus of the site.

In mid-2002 the portal aspect of the site was dropped in favour of focusing the site around the discussion forum, and the site has remained roughly in this state since.

In early 2006 the company which owns TSR was taken over. This new owner, known as CN, set about adding advertisements to the site in order to generate revenue for the running costs. This angered several users as a fundraising drive had recently been held, placement of the advertisements was widely considered intrusive and detrimental, and some of the advertisements were arguably inappropriate.

In mid-2006 the owner, CN, detailed ideas for the future of The Student Room; as part of this, CN met a small group of the moderators at a meeting in London. Many ideas were put forward and plans discussed, and over the next few months preparatory work took place for The Student Room to undergo a facelift with the addition of many improvements to attract new members,[27][28] and on 19 September 2007 the new look website was launched.

In summer 2004 the forum was also the subject of media coverage after examination questions, from papers yet to be sat, were leaked onto the forum. The user claimed the questions were sample exam questions based on the Edexcel Mathematics exam he was sitting the next day, and asked for help from other users.[29]

In May 2007 the site was heavily quoted by the BBC in an article relating to problems faced in an OCR A Level Biology Practical exam after reports to the media from an unnamed member. Some users on the site appeared to have been told far too much about the practical exam by their teachers while others heavily criticised and complained about the difficulty of the exam afterwards.[30] A similar incident was reported in May 2008,[31] again following discussion on OCR Biology A2 practical exams.

Following A Level results day in 2007, the wiki section of the site was mentioned in an article in the independent about preparing for university. It mentioned how TSR has a pretty much exhaustive list of what a student had to take to university with them.

The site was also mentioned on 16 August 2007 in 'crucial contacts' list for higher education on Nottingham Evening Post website.

In August 2008, the site was featured in a half page article in The Times as part of their students supplement produced for the A Level results day. The article looked at the content of the site, picking out key features such as the university discussion forums and the personal statement help section.[32]

In February 2009, The Student Room and DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) worked together to produce a resource for people over the age of 21 considering going back to education. The minisite features an interactive map of universities across the country, video interviews with mature students and profiles of members who went to university as a mature student.

In October 2013, the website decided to turn off a feature known as 'negative reputation' (or neg rep for short) which allowed users to negatively rate other users' posts. It was claimed by the moderators that the feature put people off expressing their opinions.[33] The change was met with much consternation, with many users calling for the drastic move's reversal; a few users supported the move as well.

• List of Internet forums

• TSRMatters.com Corporate website
• The Student Room