'Zomato for schools': Mumbai boy Akshay Agrawal creates website to rank schools

Akshay Agrawal tells his story at TEDxYouth conferenceLike most students just out of their 10th standard exams Vashi boy Akshay Agrawal too went through a couple of months of severe doubt and confusion as regards which school he should move to next While surveys on top 20 schools in the city and in the country are a dime a dozen he found no pointed source that could give out accurate information on schools outside their prospectus and websites Wordofmouth was also of little help as Akshay recallsEveryone I asked had their own reason to say something positive or negative about any particular school And their reasons could be different from mine He realised that the whole space was unregulated and infested with information that was inaccurate and outdated I realised one could do with some more order Thats where the idea of ClassFever germinated in his head An online review aggregator for schools 18yearold Akshay calls ClassFever as a Zomato for schools With 3500 schools listed on the site the idea of this platform is to democratise the review process by crowdsourcing opinions and rank schools accordingly Their network now spans beyond Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh Haryana Dehradun and DelhiInitially they were just a team of four who went around the city from school to school to create a database For the schools outside Mumbai they connected over the phone to secure more information But Akshay soon realised they needed to add more value to the data I thought maybe we could use artificial intelligence develop an algorithm based on the information and reviews we have and make it an opensource review driven platform Akshay says The platform ranks schools across six categories mdash academic luxury economics value for money recommendation and cocurricular mdash and the ratings are done on 5 Most surveys list the top 20 schools in the city or the country What about the schools in the smaller suburbs in the smaller towns that dont make that list So we rank them till the highest number and we calculate ranks every week mdash not just annually like the surveys Akshay adds The rankings have multiple scaling too so one knows where a particular school ranks in the neighbourhood in the city state and country It gets lesserknown schools notice and the transparency promotes healthy education practices says Akshay who is also a TEDx speakerThe listed schools are notified about their rankings every week And what do the schools have to say about that The reactions are interesting and they vary from excuse me who are you or Im sorry this ranking is unacceptable to thank you and heres some more info for you to factor in Akshay says He was in the 11th standard when Akshay started work on the website The idea was pitched to investors but when it got turned down repeatedly he took some monetary help from his father to kickstart the projectIt was not easy It was a classic case of the owner believing in the idea more than anyone else But now when I look back I feel thankful that we got no funding else wed have used all the money in lesser things This forced us to reinvent ourselves from the ground up The nomoney module works Akshay said There were some funny and awkward challenges for the teenager too Everyone I was working with was elder to me so they didnt really like taking instructions from me he recalls with a smile Akshay has switched seven schools thanks to his fathers transferable job So I have friends across many cities he says He roped in his former classmates to expand ClassFever to other cities They are now an alpha team of 25