Students write an essay for a class, a professor spends 15 minutes grading it and that essay ends up in the trash after a student gets it back.

A UW student in the Business School is seeking to change that standard with his newly created Web site. Scriptovia.com is a place where students can share, collaborate, publish notes, essays and other academic documents.

“The goal is to create the number-one education portal where students come every night before they do their homework,” said freshman Aseem Badshah, owner of Scriptovia. “We also want to change the landscape of education and bring 21st-century skills into education. Students can be learning collaboratively and working virtually.”

The Web site is based off of Web 2.0 concepts, which seek to integrate the user into the site by creating a Web-based community. Popular examples of existing Web 2.0 sites are YouTube and Facebook.

“In the Scriptovia community, students can post their schoolwork — essays, class notes, lab reports, presentations and more — so that others can view them, discuss them, learn from them as well as critique them,” Badshah said.

Scriptovia integrates Web 2.0 concepts by allowing users to tag their documents, create user profiles and comment on other student’s documents. Badshah hopes that students will be using the site for all types of academic documents at every stage of the writing process.

“It can have a positive element if used as a part of classroom instruction,” said Taso Lagos, a lecturer in the communication department. “It can be negative if they are, in a sense, giving each other the answers.”

Badshah stressed Scriptovia is not intended to be a destination for plagiarizers.

“We are not a service that promotes plagiarism,” Badshah said.

He cited online services, such as TurnItIn.com, that allow teachers to track down plagiarized documents as one way that technology can combat plagiarism on the Internet.

Badshah said he sees Scriptovia as an innovation that has the ability to encourage scholarship on a modern level, as opposed to simply being a cheating service.

“[Students are] very isolated,” Badshah said. “They’re not working online. They’re not collaborating.”

He sees Scriptovia as a way for students to come together in an online community that embraces the media-saturated world of the 21st century.

“If this Web site can help bring people together in such a way to foster real-life relationships, then this is something very interesting,” Lagos said.

Badshah got the idea for Scriptovia in high school, after creating a similar company known as ThinkEssay.com.

“I was working on a Civil War essay wishing I had an example to see how the essay could be structured and what resources could be used, and decided to create ThinkEssay.com to help others facing the same problem,” Badshah said.

Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at news@thedaily.washington.edu.