Authentic Reviews by Verified Students
StudentCrowd: the home of authentic student reviews
More and more of us are turning to online reviews to make all kinds of decisions. Whether it’s what laptop to buy or where to go on holiday, reviews play an important part in deciding what’s best. The same goes for all the big decisions of university life. From picking the best university for you, through to which hall to stay in, university reviews shape those choices.
The trouble is, what if those student reviews you're relying on aren’t written by real students? With so much in the news about fake reviews, it can be hard to know who to trust.
How can you tell if StudentCrowd reviews are authentic?
StudentCrowd is the only university review platform to require a verified ac.uk email address to be able to leave a review on the platform.
That means you can guarantee that every review you read with our verified student mark is from a real student studying at a university in the UK.
Why do we care so much about authentic reviews?
With 1.7 million people using our site in the last 12 months to make major decisions about university, we believe students need to hear about the real university experience, not made-up reviews written by a bot in a far-flung server room.
If you are heading to university soon, you will be about to spend a lot of money on course fees and accommodation, so you need to know our reviews are real! That's why we have done everything we can to make sure we only share trusted reviews on the StudentCrowd platform.
How do StudentCrowd reviews work?
University students can review 10 areas of university life on the StudentCrowd platform. Everything from their university, course and accommodation to banks and part-time jobs. Each area has its own review form allowing students to rate each criteria between 1 and 5 stars, based on their experience.
We then use these reviews to create our university rankings as well as league tables for accommodation, student cities and a whole host of other areas of university life.
What is the StudentCrowd Rating?
The StudentCrowd Rating is the algorithm that powers provider scores and our league table rankings. We calculate the StudentCrowd rating based on a number of factors:
Review Age: The more recent a review, the more useful the information to current and prospective students. That’s why we prioritise recent reviews.
Review Volume: The more reviews, the better! No two students are the same so the more reviews a provider has, the more representative the feedback will be. More reviews gives rise to a greater confidence that the rating accurately reflects the student experience.
Review Authenticity: Authenticity is our top priority so we're doing a lot behind the scenes to make sure our student reviews are the authentic views of students.
It can be tempting for a provider to seek out positive reviews in the hope of boosting their reputation. In the short term, that might seem like a good idea, but we know, longer term, it doesn’t stack up as students can lose trust in what they are reading.
Authenticity Signals are applied to the algorithm to reward authenticity. If students report that they felt coerced or pressured into writing a positive review, it has a negative impact on the StudentCrowd Rating.
Read our Community Guidelines for more information on our Review Policy.
Keep reading and reviewing!
So, now you know the work we’re doing to make sure the real student experience is reflected in our reviews, you can get on with the important jobs of either reading our reviews to help you make your big decisions or leaving more reviews for future students.
