So Disappointed!

What do you think, is it ethical for a school to contract out through internet websites and pay like $5 an hour for people to write positive reviews about them?

I just discovered this is one of the newest trends (at least new to me). I then went and looked and sure enough, you can spot some very poor writing and spelling saying that they are graduates of a school, giving it a great rating. I also started trending some different schools, and you can see when they started working this way as all of a sudden, their reviews go way up and you have a high quantity of them. I even started to pick up on common marketing themes in the posts.

I know it is naive, but I honestly did not realize how unethical some of the marketing is. I have never been a believer in ‘the poor student got tricked’ but I am starting to rethink that view when I see practices like this. Moreover, it is all kept at an arm’s length.

I am constantly amazed at how unsophisticated I am when it comes to how some businesses run.

It just bums me out.

DEL

 

What Web sites are you finding reviews on?

 

Um, I am certainly not going to give them more publicity and name them or link to them!

 

This is absolutely outrageous!!! They only pay me $4!

 

I always go to Rate My Professors to get details about a course, I don't see much point in looking at reviews for an entire school. I wonder if any of them are paying for positive reviews on that site.

 

I think the extra dollar is for quality!

 

I'm not surprised.

 

I’m not surprised as it is already common business practice for consumer oriented goods. Nowadays companies either have people in charge of writing positive reviews or simply monitoring sites in order to reply to criticism that they might receive from real customers. Also, many companies would take the “most influential” bloggers of their market into all expenses paid vacations to resorts around the world…

Another bogus practice that you will encounter is when a company states that they received a “prize” for being the best in the provision of a service or product. If the prize is given by a consultancy there is a 99% chance that in order to participate in the selection process a fee that could go from US$ 75,000 to US$ 250,000 must be paid and there are so many categories that almost every company that pays the fee has a number spot guaranteed. On the other hand, if the prize is given by an “industry association” then 99% chance that the entity giving the award is simply a lobby group in charge of promoting the “winners” interests.

Going back to universities, it is outrageous and sad… Education is someone’s future, and they simply don’t care.

JFO

 

Of course, that seems to be unethical. I am sure most of distance learning students rely online feedback to engage any school admission. Frankly, I did lot of researches on sources like those to do make my decision for college I want to apply. Then finally I narrowed down to Capella University vs Nova Southeastern University, which due to financial I go for Capella over Nova.

BTW, I was paid only $3.00 per review for University of Southern Mexifornia. Even though I have to make my own diploma for that $3.00.

 

They most certainly do care. They care about the shareholders, how much revenue they can generate, and the price of their stock. Oh, you meant about the students? :lol:

 

Eh, everything on the net is a paid-for lie these days.
Astroturfing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
50 Cent Party - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

This makes me wonder if some of the venomous, over-the-top negative reviews on those sites are paid for by competitors. I have never taken those review sites seriously anyway.

 

It's a pretty impotent attack, wouldn't you say?

 

What a mess. Almost every day I am disappointed by something concerning the lengths people will go to. I guess everything is Pravda, the news, advertising, and probably 25% of 'us' on the internet are really corps or their lackies, or the government and their lackies, or an 'enemy' and their lackies...

With so much information available we are almost back to no information available...

I hadn’t thought about the negative reviews too, but you are probably correct on that as well.

 

Advertising of any kind must be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of the industry. When I am on an airplane and see ads for the "Top 10 plastic surgeons," "Top 20 steakhouses" or "Top MBA programs," I take them for what they are: advertisements based on non-empirical data. And even those rankings based on some criteria (such as U.S. News and World Report's Best Colleges) often reflect certain colleges' abilities to manipulate certain data to increase their ranking.

Paid endorsements from fake former students? Take a look at any infomercial or celebrity endorsement. Does it really surprise us that schools would engage in similar activities? Perhaps the most surprised would be those who assume (naively) that only the for-profit sector of education would engage in this type of promotion. Unfortunately, I have seen this and worse during my two decades in non-profit K-12 and higher education.

 

Good points, when you go look with a critical eye it is very wide spread, that doesn't make it right though. I think an above post is correct, when you read these and see some of the terrible spelling, and duplicate copy paste posts you hope that people will understand it for what it is. Also same thing for some of the really bad posts, which as someone pointed out could be just as fake..

 

I think there is still lots of opportunities to go dark in marketing. Looking forward to the day when marketing campaigns become as nasty as presidential elections

But that whole issue is not much of a surprise. Objectivity is just a myth