<p>My sons have been reading studentsreivew site and one has been interested in USC and his app is in and complete. As he read this site he began to second guess applying there due to the overall negative reviews on USC. </p>
<p>I explained that there would always be some discontent no matter what college was being discussed but he mentioned when the majority of reviews are so negative it had him wondering?</p>
<p>Has anyone else had any experience with this site and do you give it any credit at all?</p>
<p>If you see a recurring negative trend about a school, there may be some veracity to those reviews. What’s done is done and your son has applied. If anything, he shouldn’t worry about looking at studentsreview.com as it’s no longer relevant. If he gets accepted to USC, then he should visit and see if he can find out more about that particular problem from the students.</p>
<p>Short answer: the reports seem pretty much on target for the schools that my kids have actually attended, and also seem to echo impressions they got while visiting other schools. So for a large school like USC if you see the same issues recurring in the reviews, it might merit further investigation on your part.</p>
<p>It’s almost certainly a mistake to trust anonymous web reviews without knowing the people, context, etc. That said, I have been pretty impressed with the overall quality of the studentsreview comments on schools where I feel I know enough to judge. So I agree with calmom: don’t take it as gospel, but do take it as something to look into further.</p>
<p>The problem is that there is a selection bias in who writes the reviews. It’s not a scientific sample that is representative of USC students in general. Someone with a a grudge or an axe to grind is far more likely to be motivated enough to write a review in the first place.</p>
<p>OK, I’m not sure whether “USC” in this case refers to Southern Calif. or South Carolina… so I don’t know which school’s site to look at. But at my kid’s schools, the positive review fars outnumber the negative, so despite the logic of Coureur’s comment concerning selection bias, the actual site content doesn’t seem to bear that out. In any case, for the schools that I know something about, even the negatives make some sense, even though some are kind of silly or clearly reflect personal biases of the poster, such as posters who complain about the overall political culture of a school.</p>
<p>I have also found studentsreview to be a little unbalanced if there are not many reviews. Another site to look at is link removed for reviews. One of the features is a financial review.</p>
<p>I agree with the idea that people with strong feelings (positive or negative) are more likely to submit reviews, so it’s hard to gauge what the average “person on the street” student thinks. It’s for that reason that I like the “neutral” or “advice” comments, particularly ones that are well thought out and written. Although I have to admit that my favorite studentsreview quote was “If someone tells you to go here, you should punch them in the face. If you’re a parent, and your child says they want to go here, you should punch them in the face. If you have decided you want to go here, you should punch yourself in the face”. I’m hoping he eventually transferred.</p>
<p>OK, you’ve got 132 comments for USC, so that’s definitely a large enough number to give you a good statistical sampling. With that number you are going to get a fairly high degree of accuracy on the survey data. There are 51 positive comments, 47 negative, and 30 neutral – which is probably as close to an even split as you will ever see. I would take any common themes that show up through those threads very seriously. </p>
<p>I glanced through some of the negatives, and they seem to be mostly complaints about campus culture – the naysayers perceive kids as snobbish and materialistic, and complain about the overall conservatavism of the campus. Which means that if your son is himself conservative and a preppy type, none of those complaints would apply – all of those things really are “fit” issues. However, the large number of comments would make me feel that the USC campus culture is probably somewhat pervasive – so if I were the parent of a tree-hugging liberal (and I am) – I’d be very wary of USC based on the reviews I read. </p>
<p>Note: since I was only browsing them in the context of this thread, I may have mischaracterized them based on a cursory reading. I think its worthwhile for a prospective student to read all 132 comments, as daunting a prospect as that may be.</p>
<p>132 comments isn’t necessarily a “good statistical sampling”, because of the bias issue people have identified (the students who comment will tend to be students with strong feelings one way or another; the “average” student could theoretically have a completely different perspective). </p>
<p>So, take it for what it is: an un-random set of comments from people with strong feelings. That doesn’t make it useless at all – just something to be taken with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Nope. That could be counted on to give an accurate picture of the school ONLY if the 132 kids were carefully selected to be representative of the school population as a whole and they were then asked to write a review. The simple fact that they were motivated enough to write in on their own already introduces a selection bias as noted above. As a general rule, the only way that self-selected samples can be accurate is by accident.</p>
<p>So, how much credence do you give to Princeton Review’s descriptions and rankings, also based on voluntary survey data? And what about US News rankings-- as far as I know, their “peer-review” process is about as self-selected as you can get.</p>
<p>Read all the reviews (studentreviews, princeton, us news, whatever else you an dredge up), visit visit visit, get your kid (if she or he is willing - mine aren’t) to network on line and then form your own opinions.</p>
<p>Remember, people make decisions on an un-scientific basis all the time. In fact, it’s rare for any decision actually to be made on the basis of statistically valid information that squarely addresses the decisionmaker’s concerns. And even if you do have such information, it’s probabilistic only: not “what will my experience be” (which is the unanswerable question every decisionmaker has) but more like “what is the range of experiences I may have, and where in that range does a plurality fall”. </p>
<p>With a college, if you had a statistically valid sample of comments from students, you still would not likely have a valid sample of comments from introverted African-American kids who like Latin American literature, or ENTJ women doing biology research, or kids who like frats and kids who don’t. So even the most “perfect” information won’t be nearly good enough to make a really informed choice.</p>
<p>In this, as in every other human endeavor, you use what information you have. Studentsreview.com, Princeton Review, CC, the kids who graduated from your high school last year, whatever. My daughter followed livejournal communities – that really helped her decide, but I think they have gotten a lot more anemic since facebook took over.</p>
<p>If you’re concerned about StudentsReview, also check out the comments on Vault.com–click on Education-> Student/Alumni surveys-> Undergraduate Surveys and find the school you’re looking for (or the state it’s in and then the school name). There are tabs for Admissions, Academics, Employment, Quality of Life and Social Life. Most of the comments are positive, some are negative, but most seem fairly accurate.</p>
<p>Another one that bothers me (but my D “uses”) is Ratemyprofessor.com. What a scary thought. She knows not to put much stock in individual comments but when you throw a biscuit to a starving man he’s not going to be too picky. ;)</p>
<p>So far at her college they have been generally fairly true to form (the ardent feminist is an ardent feminist, the great philosophy prof does have a serious problem getting papers graded timely) but now that she is on campus she has several other and hopefully better or at least more current sources of info at her disposal.</p>
<p>Self-selected surveys are notoriously inaccurate. Those phone-in polls that local TV news programs use to “assess” public opinion about this or that controversy are pretty much useless. That’s why legitimate polling organizations spend tons of money developing scientifically-valid population samples. And then they go out and contact members of the sample and ask the poll questions. </p>
<p>Just asking for all comers who happen to feel like it to contact you and offer up their opinions is cheap and easy, but it is almost guaranteed to yield bad data.</p>
<p>Self-selected reviews are going to be skewed towards the negative; people are much more inclined to stop and complain than they are to stop and praise.</p>
<p>That said, I believe that CalMom’s extraction about the campus culture on USC is not without considerable merit.</p>