<p>How much accuracy are there in these type of sites and this one in particular? I have to say after reading about almost any school there you often come away with a more negative opinion. My daughter hasn't wanted to look although some schools she is interested in skew differently than she thinks both academically and socially which might help her choices</p>
<p>Anything you read there should be taken with a grain of salt. Each review is, after all, just a single person's opinion. Furthermore, dissatisfied people tend to be more vocal about their experiences, skewing the results toward the negative end. And then you have people who post negative reviews "for fun", skewing the results even more.</p>
<p>overwhelmedma, I definitely agree with you that about almost any school there you get a more negative opinion than you would have had without it. Take Swarthmore. A lot of people have said bad things about Swarthmore, but something still draws me there, over the University of Chicago, which had great reviews. I don't recommend that website. You don't even have to be a graduate of that college to post something! So I could post a horrible, inaccurate review about Harvard or Princeton, without even having gone there! And it's very likely that many people have done that. There's a lot of bias in the reviews. I recommend reading guidebooks, even though I don't know how much better they are.</p>
<p>I would suggest that a great many of the "reviews" on that site are written by high school students who haven't attended the college they are reviewing...or any other college for that matter. If you pay close attention to the "reviewers", you can easily identify many "sock puppets" posting "reviews" under multiple aliases.</p>
<p>I mean, **what are the odds **of five different reviewers being accepted to Swarthmore with low 1300 SATs and rating the quality of academics at Swarthmore as a "C-"? Even students who hate Swarthmore praise the quality of the academics. Even the professors praise the quality of the academics and their students' engagement. A "C-" must be graded on a pretty tough curve.</p>
<p>I will definitely break my habit of reading them. Thanks for the feedback.</p>