How Student Verdict works

Everything is rated out of 10, in half points. The score you see is the average of what students said, with the number of ratings next to it.

Rankings are not ordered by raw average, so a school with two perfect ratings can’t outrank one with thousands of good ones. Each score is adjusted for how many ratings back it, recent ratings count more than old ones, and a school needs 15 ratings to be ranked (5 for a department, 3 for a professor).

Anyone may rate without a password. The email address used determines how much a rating counts:

• An address at the university being rated — full weight, including former and alumni addresses
• An address at another university — 45%
• A personal address — 25%
• Disposable inbox services — not accepted

One rating per school per person. Went to more than one school? Rate each of them, and add each school’s email — every rating uses the address from the school it’s about. Reviews say whether the writer is a current student, a graduate, or transferred in or out.

Each school page shows how much of its score came from school email addresses.

Anyone can ask a question or reply to a review. There are no usernames: people appear as Student A, Visitor B and so on, and those labels only apply within one thread. Comments never affect scores.

The forum has boards for getting in, paying for college, transferring, student life, and majors and careers. A thread can be tagged with a university, and questions asked on a university’s page appear there too.

Acceptance rates, test scores, cost, graduation rates, earnings and the makeup of the student body come from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard. They are federal figures, not student ratings, and are labeled as such wherever they appear. Federal data is published with a delay of a year or more, so policies such as testing requirements should be confirmed with each university.

Your email is never shown, sold or stored — only a one-way hash of it is kept. Reviews show only what you choose to add: current student or alumni, class year and department. There are no profiles.

Reviews are not removed for being negative or at a university’s request. The following are removed:

• — Harassment, threats and personal attacks
• — Private information such as phone numbers or addresses
• — Discriminatory content
• — Unsupported serious accusations about identifiable people
• — Spam and fake reviews

Every review has a Report link. Professor pages are about the class, not the person, and there are no pages about students. The full rules are in the Terms of Use; requests can be sent to support@studentverdict.com.