Shmoop is a company that sells test-prep guides. They will hire you as a content writer to do a certain scope of work, but then they will increase the scope and hold your payment hostage. This includes expanding a 1-2 page "section" from your original agreement into, say, five 1-2 page subsections, with no increase in pay. This results in an hourly pay rate of approximately $5/hour for the freelancer.
Also, Shmoop as a company does nothing to research what will actually be on each test. They may hire you to write a study guide on, say, Faulkner, but they don't bother to tell you what the kids need to know about Faulkner.
On their website, they claim to hire staff members who are experts on these tests and have been on the committees to design these tests, but that is not true. They have no clue what type of questions will be asked, what level of detail will be tested, or what specific details will be tested. If you were to go based on their claims, then you might think you had some contact person to feed you this information so you could write good material on it. The truth is, they are shooting in the dark, and they hold YOU, the freelancer, responsible for picking up their slack. But hey, if Shmoop can't come up with this information, then how is the freelance writer supposed to come up with it? If it's not publicly available, then you can't get it.
So Shmoop will sit there and let you spend a couple hundred hours writing educational content on the subject matter, and then they will cut your pay in half because you ask them to tell you what the test questions should be like, but they don't know and you don't know either, which means they have to "hire someone else" to come up with the questions. Who knows who this person will be. Whoever it is, if they have access to this secret information, then they are certainly not going to give it away for $5/hr.
Shmoop shouldn't call themselves a test-prep company if they don't even have mechanisms in place to discover what the guidelines are for the tests themselves.
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