PostYourTest.com, a growing San Diego Web site, allows students to post and share old exams without consent from their professors.
The Web site has received criticism from some university professors who believe it violates scholastic honesty and even copyright laws.
The site's creator, Demir Oral, argues that he is providing free, anonymous and equal access to study materials for all students.
Oral, a St. Louis University graduate, said on the Web site his mission is to "facilitate education through various means to help students throughout the world get their A."
"I'm sure I will get a lot of questions about the morality of PostYourTest.com," Oral said in an email. "I want people to understand that this Web site is not a tool for cheating and I do not advocate cheating in any way."
Most of the approximately 500 exams on the site are from courses at the University of California at San Diego, but Oral said on the site that he hopes to one day make the site the world's largest online test repository.
Exams are, by federal law, copyrighted material. However, Oral's Web site falls into ambiguous territory because the exams are being used for non-profit educational purposes only.
"I guess some students have been able to get ahold of unfair study materials in the past, so making them available to everyone may level out the playing field in theory," said English junior Stephanie Finger. "But still, I think professors probably design their classes assuming that such materials aren't available. Now that they are so easily accessible, professors will probably have to take that into account."
USCD has alerted its professors to the issues and given them the option of adding their names to a ban list so that no one may upload material from their classes to the site.
"It's not a bad idea, but I think the professors would have to give their consent," said Katie Moore, a linguistics sophomore. "I had a geology professor who would post past tests on Blackboard, but I also had a linguistics teacher who would never let us leave with a copy of a test."
