<p>I have a problem with studentsreview.com - maybe it's just me or the colleges I'm looking at. Every college I look at, there are SO many negative reviews - more negative than positive for the most part. </p>
<p>How reliable is it?</p>
<p>There's already a big discussion on this; search for it.</p>
<p>idk i think it was dead on</p>
<p>The basic problem is that the people most likely to post are the ones who have a complaint, not just about colleges but on any topic.</p>
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The basic problem is that the people most likely to post are the ones who have a complaint, not just about colleges but on any topic.
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<p>Exactly. The people most likely to write a review on that site are ones that either hate the school they're at or love it. The variance is very high, so it's not the greatest source for what the school is really like. But of course you can shake out the extreme parts of the review and still get useful grains of info.</p>
<p>response bias is a problem with any statistical survey such as studentsreview, its useful to read some of the reviews cuz it gives you some detailed negatives/positives about the schools, but don't take the comments to heart.</p>
<p>Some reviews are bogus, too. They are written in a way that obviously isn't written by a student who attends the college.</p>
<p>A staff member will be showing up shortly to stifle the criticism. ;)</p>
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<p>There's already a big discussion on this; search for it.</p>
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<p>That thread has been removed, as far as I can tell, so perhaps we can have a new discussion that sticks to the rules better.</p>
<p>See, I was just looking at colleges like Ohio Wesleyan, Earlham, etc. and there's all this talk (on Ohio Wesleyan) about it truely being a terrible school and the staff are the ones on there writing nice things about it, and even that cc is in on the scam? It made me really scared because I'm going to visit it on the 12th! Now I don't know if it's worth it. I think studentsreview.com does more harm than good, for me at least. Some of the reviews get so passionate that it's hard to tell the true ones from the fake.</p>
<p>One of the former directors of Students Review noted that they take great pains in insure valid reviews and have a number of ways to tell bogus reviews or if there is the same reviewer. </p>
<p>I use it to show several things</p>
<p>1.First, use it to show what the average SAT score of the posters. Usually I find it quite acurate of the median student
2. Second, I use it for trends. There might be some bizarre posts,but if many other posts are similar, this might indicate a general trend.
3. Third, I research the negative points to see if there is any validity to the points that they raise.
4. Fourth, you can click "educational quality" in the reviews and get a rating on each department.
5. I like to see how many of the students would attend this school if they had to do it over again. There is a very handy graph that illustrates this.</p>
<p>Overall,I find it fairly useful</p>
<p>For some reaons CC and they don't get along. CC thinks of them as competition,which it really isn't in my opinion. They are different sites altogether.</p>
<p>You can find their URL by going to YAHOO and researching "students review. "I can't post their url link since I was told it violates the Terms of Service for CC. Be advised about this.</p>
<p>I buy the argument of afterhours..."The people most likely to write a review on that site are ones that either hate the school they're at or love it". oneiros lykos8, I read the comments about OWU. My opinon is that it is a solid school academically. What's interesting is that the last negative comment was by a person who studied Animal Studies. There is no Animal Studies major at OWU. (and Zoology was actually one of the options). Keep the comments on studentsreview in mind for your visits. You can always ask students on campus what they think and then figure out which comments are bogus and which ones are not. It'd be cool if you post what your impressions are after your visit and compare them with the ones from studentsreview. There are quite a few people who are interested in Ohio Wesleyan on this forum.</p>
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<p>One of the former directors of Students Review noted that they take great pains in insure valid reviews and have a number of ways to tell bogus reviews</p>
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<p>What rubbish. Did you notice that the director never mentioned what those double-secret verification methods are? Through IP addresses, it can be possible to tell that one person is posting over and over, so they may remove repeats that way. But telling a bogus review? There are simple ways to ensure that reviews are actually written by students/alumni -- like requiring registration with a yourcollege.edu email account -- but that site doesn't use them. Alumni and students of each school live all over the world and use all kinds of computers. This site is not run by the FBI. There is absolutely nothing to stop you from writing an alumnus review of Utah State on there, and if you write it halfway plausibly with a little Web research, no way for them to figure out whether it's genuine or not.</p>
<p>I also loved the way that poster discounted the entire field of statistics and the entire concept of scientific significance, because they only exist to push useless drugs onto the population. If you're planning to major in Scientology, that's a reasonable approach, but if you want to do anything in any field of the liberal arts (or engineering or marketing or accounting, for that matter), you're going to need a good grasp of why samples matter.</p>
<p>Are there any other sites like studentsreview.com?</p>
<p>^^^ Campusdirt.com.</p>
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What rubbish.
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<p>I agree. The site is obviously flawed in its culling of reviews.</p>
<p>The school I've looked at most closely, Swarthmore, has one obvious parody review (actually quite well written) that is filled with tip-offs like complaining about "intellectual Jews", huge lecture classes, and professors who are not accessible to or interested in students because they are consumed with their research. The kind of thing that a Daily Jolt contributor would write.</p>
<p>In other case, the same person posts under at least four different identities with four different majors, with the tip-off being the identical (and VERY atypical) SAT score and awarding puzzling grades such as a "Ds" and "C-" across the board for "Educational Quality". In one of these "reviews", he/she/it writes, "You will spend hours debating John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud, and other dead people...." There are things that could be graded low at Swarthmore, but poor "educational quality" would not among the typical perceptions of actual students. But, because there is no culling of the reviews, Swarthmore is rated as a C- or worse for "educational quality" by a full quarter of the graders.</p>
<p>Every school I've looked at is plagued by the same problem -- some legitimate reviews citing pluses and minuses interspersed with obvious hoax posts.</p>
<p>I actually think that a great many reviews on the site are written by high-school seniors. They are too superficial to be anything but recitations of stereotypes. It's actually pretty easy to spot the legit reviews because they include accurate and detailed mentions of strengths and weaknesses that could only be written by real students.</p>
<p>Take all such sites with a grain of salt. Even the quality of academics at HARVARD is rated a C+ on students review.</p>
<p>Remember, the perfect school for one person can be horrible for someone else. You have no way of knowing who these people are, or how they compare to you and what you might like or not like. Also keep in mind that some of the comments were written quite a while ago. And, for most schools the number of comments is actually a small percentage of the population, not a statistically accurate sample. (Campus Dirt is even worse - they don't even tell you how many people have sent in their comments. Use their reviews with particular caution!)</p>
<p>That said, take some of the comments that worry you and ask students on your visit if they feel the same way. Ultimately, you have to trust your own judgement about what is right for you individually --- but every school has its detractors and people who wouldn't be happy anywhere.</p>
<p>Some schools have really awesome reviews actually - you just have to find them. I was surprised by Ohio University (athens) review. Definitely very positive results.</p>
<p>I also think that students have to keep their expectations realistic.</p>
<p>Wealth... i freaking love you... your promoting ohio university even more than i am..... and yes ohio university is the greatest you'll never find ppl to say anything bad about it</p>
<p>i agree with taxguys reasoning.. i use it to look for trends, and i just take it with a grain of salt, along with all those other sites, like campusdirt and college p r o w l e r (i dont know why we cant type that but cc automatically ***s it out when i do). i also look at princeton review, my fiske guide, and of course, collegeconfidential. definite trends, and they balance eachtoerh out since fiske usually looks towards the positives and the student sites are usually more negatively focused (since the people who write them are the ones holed up in their rooms complaining rahter than out trying to have a good time... and the people who ARE out having a good time are too busy to write a review!). anwyas, you cant visit every school, so you need to find other ways to get honest info about them.</p>