Worst college web sites

Parent Cafe
1

<p>I am always amazed at how bad some college web sites are. Even basic information can be impossible to find (for instance, tuition/ room and board are often well concealed). I really hate the ones where you are supposed to type in a “question” and it will bring up answers - they don’t work! </p>

<p>My vote for worst site is Case Western. </p>

<p>It is harder to assess “best” web sites - because when you go to a site and find what you need, it seems you don’t notice that is was easy. </p>

<p>This morning I was trying to determine SAT II requirements at my son’s (very preliminary) list of 29 schools. Amazingly, the College Board site does not really give accurate information on this.</p>

2

<p>Anyone ever look at William and Mary’s website and try to figure out the cost of attendance? They only list it by semester and it’s in a weird format. Why make it so difficult? I wish it was standardized!</p>

3

<p>I’ve always found Mary Washington’s website both non-intuitive to navigate and also unattractive to look at. <a href=“http://www.umw.edu%5B/url%5D”>www.umw.edu</a></p>

4

<p>It was hard for me to find lists of majors/courses of study on Bennington’s web site. This is the one that stands out, to me, as being difficult to use.</p>

5

<p>Agree - tuition, room and board are often ridiculously hard to find (there is never a clickable place that says "tuition, room/board, or “cost of attending”, it is almost always buried in some other area). Also, basic admissions requirements such as SAT II’s are very hard to find - why not a page titled “Admissions requirements” on every site?</p>

6

<p>Of course some schools want to hide the tuition. They don’t want anyone going into tuition shock without first geting to like the school It is all very cleverly done.</p>

<p>One thing is usually the case, if you can’t easily find the tuition, it is going to be high.</p>

7

<p>Weenie, this may be of some help:</p>

<p>When looking for SAT II, remember that the “new” name is SAT Subject tests.</p>

<p>Google may be your best friend in two ways:</p>

<p>a. Prepare a search such as SAT Subject tests xxx.edu and replace xxx with your favorite school. </p>

<p>b. go to web site of your school and use the SEARCH CURRENT SITE feature of google. The easiest way is to use Google toolbar. </p>

<p>I just did it for 3 or 4 schools and got to the correct pages pretty fast.</p>

8

<p>Thanks Xiggi!</p>

9

<p>Purdue’s website is pretty bad … it just seems much too cluttered</p>