<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>