Final exam procrastination reached chart-topping levels in January when the University placed in the top 10 colleges using the trivia website Sporcle.com.
In November 2010, Sporcle started keeping track of colleges’ usage of the site. The University ranked in the top 10 from Jan. 9 to Jan. 22, the two weeks of fall term final exams.
The feat is especially remarkable considering that Princeton is significantly smaller than many of the other schools which frequent the website, such as University of Michigan and Ohio State University.
Princeton’s high participation during final exams signals that “students enjoy taking a brain-busting game as a break from studying [and making] study guides to prep,” Derek Pharr, Sporcle’s vice president of products, said.
Ian Henry, Sporcle’s public relations associate, said he believes students are fond of the website because it is “a great site to kill some time” and thinks that “students are using it for education[al] purposes.”
“From a college student perspective, the site is a great tool to help them study and prepare for finals and tests,” he explained.
He added that the company hopes to build upon the educational benefit of the site in coming years.
Some students agree that Sporcle.com can have educational merits.
Patrick Roche ’14 said that he “goes to Sporcle when he wants a distraction,” but explained that he has gained some knowledge along the way.
However, self-proclaimed “Sporcle pundit” Stephen Martis ’12 was not too convinced about the potential educational benefits of the website.
“All of freshman year, that’s pretty much all I did,” he said.
He added, however, that ”the usefulness of knowing all the three-letter body parts is questionable.”
Thomas Scott ’14 noted that it is easy to lose track of time when using the website.
“I usually just think that I’m taking a quick break, which ends up lasting a lot longer than I expected,” he explained.
Since January, Princeton has dropped off the top colleges in the website’s rankings.
It has recently fallen behind other Ivy League schools, including the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.
Sporcle is a trivia game website which was started in 2007 by Matt Ramme as part of a personal effort to learn more trivia.
Since then the website has expanded to host over 150,000 quizzes generated by the company and its users.
The website’s quizzes range from the educational, such as Spanish vocabulary, to the entertaining, such as 100 movie quotes, and the esoteric, such as the top 100 male names in 2007.
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