<p>Rank List Category
#15 The Toughest To Get Into Academics
#11 Great College Library Administration
#11 Lots Of Beer Parties
#15 Major Frat And Sorority Scene Parties
#9 Best Quality of Life Quality of Life
#6 Great Campus Food Quality of Life
#5 Happy Students Quality of Life</p>
<p>Someone should post this up on the general boards...if people like to discuss those crap Chinese and British rankings so much, this should be good for them, too.</p>
<p>The site may be most useful for its reviews. Many of the people who write to this site (and other similar sites) are looking for a venue to vent their frustrations, and for this reason, many of the reviews seem to be rather negative. Dartmouth, for example, with its # 1 rankings, still only showed a 73.8% approval rating (Harvard's was only 65.1%). </p>
<p>Nobody should make decisions about a college based on a single survey or rankings (whether they are from a "dubious" site like Students Review or from US News or the Princeton Review), but if nothing else, these sites offer points for discussion and may introduce some questions worth asking of those who are perhaps more knowledgeable.</p>
<p>The Students Review site also has a program for "Dynamic Rankings." This program allows you to select some of the factors that are most important to you, and to select the level of importance of those factors. From this, the site can give you a more personalized ranking of which schools best meet your criteria. The dynamic rankings are still based on surveys, and still not completely scientific, but they may shine a new light on some of the schools that you are considering.</p>
<p>Because there are so many reliable sources out there (from satisfied alumni to books written by informed authors) giving accurate information about Dartmouth's merits, it's a real shame to see studentsreview.com being touted as a good source.</p>
<p>Here's the problem. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO BE A STUDENT/ALUM IN ORDER TO FILL OUT THE SURVEY. There is no verification whatsoever -- you don't even have to submit a college e-mail address.</p>
<p>In other words, anyone with an ax to grind -- or who wants to amuse himself -- or anybody else who's so inclined -- can fill out a survey claiming to be a student at that college. In fact, they can fill out twenty surveys pretending to be twenty different students; it only takes a couple of minutes to do each one. If there were thousands of surveys per school, I might be skeptical about whether enough people were playing with the site to really skew the results. But where there are less than a hundred respondents per school -- often less than fifty -- just one jerk playing around can completely mess things up.</p>
<p>If you're skeptical about whether there are a lot of folks out there with time on their hands who entertain themselves by spamming admissions sites and making it difficult for people to use the sites ... well, stop by *******.com once in a while and watch the trolls have a party.</p>
<p>There's no "scientific" way of massaging such corrupted data, and no way of "recognizing its biases," that can help you separate the crap from the genuine on a site like that. Even Princeton Review, which doesn't claim to be scientific, at least goes onto campuses to ensure that people filling out its surveys are actually at that school.</p>
<p>Many of the reviews are worthless, and some are suspiciously illiterate (which leads me to believe that some of them...as Hanna suggests...may not have been written by Dartmouth students); Nevertheless, buried among the detritus there are actually quite a few really well-written and insightful mini-essays. As an alumnus of Dartmouth, I really do believe that the lengthier reviews on the site were truly written by Dartmouth students or alumni, as advertised. They are not one-sided, they point out Dartmouth's negatives as well as the (many) positives, and they contain too much factual information and insights consistent with my own experience to have been written by pretenders. Some of the shorter quips are of less certain parentage...especially those with poor grammar. I agree that the rankings, per se, are relatively meaningless, but I do see some value to the commentaries (It is just too much work to write a thoughtful essay, researching the school and dealing with both postives and negatives, if you truly have no connection to the school.) I agree with Hanna (and others on this board) that the site has its faults...I just do not believe that it is totally without merit. I cannot speak to the accuracy of the comments about Harvard on the Students Review site, as I have no personal knowledge of student life at Harvard. I can attest to the overall accuracy of the Dartmouth commentary. </p>
<p>Check it out, and keep asking questions. The truth of the matter is that Dartmouth and Harvard are both outstanding colleges. I can tell you that in my experience Dartmouth students do not tend to have a "sour grapes" attitude with respect to Harvard...they tend to be overwhelmingly happy to be in Hanover. Dartmouth students consider themselves second to none among other Ivies. And while there may be an Ivy tradition of trash-talking other sister schools, very few people really believe that "Harvard sucks." Most believe that it is an excellent place to go to graduate school.</p>
<p>StudentsReview.com does have a screening system, and usually catches the false surveys. According to the people who run this site, "It may be possible to submit 1 false survey, and if you are really super-bent on it, two. But not a hundred. After 4 surveys the system automatically flags the surveys, and they don't get posted." </p>
<p>The Dartmouth reviews were recently screened, and it was determined that some of them were of malicious intent and not valid. They have now been removed, and Dartmouth's numbers and grades (which were previously high enough to place the school at #1 in many categories) are even higher.</p>
<p>For example, once the spurious reviews were screened out, all of Dartmouth's grades instantly rose to the A level (except the surrounding city, B-). 36 out of 40 Dartmouth reviewers would return to Hanover if given the chance (as opposed to only 40 out of 59 Harvard reviewers who would return to Cambridge).</p>
<p>Even if you checked it out once before, check it out again. Dartmouth rocks!</p>