There is little doubt that choosing a school for your child will be one of the major decisions you will make as a parent. The issue is that most research is being conducted online these days, and the Internet has become a noisy place where everyone can leave reviews – both honest and fraudulent.
Marketing agencies write glowing five-star reviews, disgruntled parents post one-star rants about their problems, and even AI is capable of producing realistic looking testimonies. Tripadvisor admitted removing over one million fake reviews in a single year. There are no guarantees that educational institutions are safe from fraudulent activities, especially if you are looking for a school internationally.
That does not mean that researching online will do your family no good. On the contrary, there are many ways to conduct effective research, to collect the information about the school you are interested in, and to avoid scams.
Follow these simple instructions, and your research process will be productive and informative.
Start with official data, not opinions
To begin with, you should form a factual foundation about the school. Knowing certain information will help you evaluate testimonials better because it will be clear when somebody is lying or exaggerating.
In the US, you will be able to access statistics provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, which includes information about enrollment numbers, student-to-teacher ratios, and demographics. You can check standardized test results, graduation rates, and accountability grades provided by state departments of education.
In the UK, the Office for Standards in Education conducts thorough inspections, and you will find detailed inspection reports about the school on their website. Most other countries provide similar resources, including accreditation certificates issued by relevant organizations such as the Council of International Schools that are also available online.
Why is this information necessary? The matter is that fake reviews are always short on facts. If somebody writes that the school is fantastic due to great teachers and a wonderful environment, you may suspect that the review is fake if you know the enrollment numbers or other facts related to the school.
Learn the characteristics of fake reviews
Fake reviews were difficult to detect when people used to create them manually. Today, even cheap artificial intelligence services are capable of producing flawless testimonies within seconds. Nevertheless, the patterns that can reveal scams remain unchanged. Researchers focused on review fraud have identified a number of factors that make reviews suspicious.
Pay attention to the following warning signs when studying testimonials about the schools:
Suspicious timing. If the institution had two reviews per month for years but suddenly received fifteen glowing reviews in a week, the chances that some kind of promotion was going on are pretty high. It is important to check review dates in addition to rating.
Users with zero activity elsewhere. Check user profiles where this option is possible to click. An account that was registered yesterday has only one review that does not belong to the location of this institution, and several reviews in completely unrelated categories are obviously fake.
Excessively emotional language with zero specifics. Real reviews, whether they are negative or positive, contain details such as names of specific classes, events or people involved. A fake review tends to use words like "amazing", "best", or "absolute nightmare" and does not offer a single detail.
Finally, it is worthwhile to pay special attention to review gating. Some institutions send satisfaction surveys to their students' families and encourage those who gave positive answers to leave a review publicly. What we see on the reviews pages is the outcome of this process – a set of reviews with perfect scores and no drawbacks mentioned.
Such review profiles can easily mislead you into thinking that the institution is excellent. Any institution with many families has certain shortcomings, and testimonials with 5 stars out of five are obviously marketing material.
Cross-reference across multiple platforms
Do not rely on one website only. All platforms are vulnerable to scammers who are interested in promoting particular institutions and will not waste their time manipulating multiple sources. In case of school-related fraud, the best solution is to cross-reference different sources to find inconsistencies or confirmations.
Google Maps will be helpful if you wish to analyze reviews, but it would also be nice to visit dedicated sites where users leave testimonials, such as GreatSchools and Niche. Local parent groups on Facebook and Reddit will allow you to study discussions about the schools you consider. In contrast with other sources, parent groups will not give you a clear picture of what others think; instead, you should interpret it yourself.
Once you manage to compare information from four or five different sources, you will get closer to making an informed decision. If a particular institution received an impressive score from a reputable website and a mediocre grade from a smaller but equally authoritative source, you should investigate this inconsistency and learn the cause. For example, a lower score on a secondary platform may reflect actual problems of the institution, or it may be the result of an angry user who left a one-star review without any valid reasons.
What should you do if you relocate abroad and wish to research schools in the target country? Sometimes, review sites and ranking websites feature different content if accessed from other locations, and some education websites are not available to foreigners at all. A popular way of solving this issue is to install a VPN for pc and switch your virtual location to the city you will move to. In this case, you will get access to all necessary information.
Dig into the school's web presence
As mentioned above, reviews are just one of the sources of information and are relatively unreliable. However, the school you choose is actively publishing various materials online, and many of them may be of interest to you.
First of all, it would be wise to analyze the newsletters provided by the institution. You will see how the school operates, learn more about its culture, and even understand when major changes take place. Secondly, you can check staff pages on the Wayback Machine and compare recent ones with the pages created two or three years ago. As a rule, staff turnover is an alarming sign that may indicate internal issues.
Thirdly, searching local news sites or Google News may be fruitful because many problems in a school get covered in the press before they are mentioned in testimonials. Moreover, school board meeting minutes are public documents that reveal many aspects of the institution you are interested in. Lastly, public social networks such as Instagram are worth exploring because they show the atmosphere in a school and let you get closer to students.
Verify online findings in person
All the information mentioned above is helpful for narrowing your search and learning more about the institution. However, you will still need to take action in the real world to make sure that you have not made a mistake in your assumptions.
It is recommended to visit the school during a regular working day rather than during an open house. It is better to ask the school administration to introduce you to other parents because it may take them some time to do it. Try to stay in the schoolyard at pickup time and observe the behavior of students and parents, and start chatting with a couple of them. Parents are unlikely to refuse to chat briefly with another parent who asks a few questions about the institution.
Remember that you should bring your research with you because some of the problems may be obvious in real life. For example, if reviews mentioned poor communication, you can ask the head of the school how families are informed about the developments and what happens if a parent raises certain concerns.
Trust patterns, not individual voices
The best strategy to detect fake testimonials is to stop focusing on each review and analyze general tendencies instead. It will be much easier to detect fake reviews if you look at clustered dates, repeated phrases, or hollow praise, while one angry or enthusiastic reviewer does not prove anything.
Your child is expected to spend a thousand hours in school during the next year, and it is worth conducting careful research. First of all, you should learn as many facts about the institution as you can. Secondly, you need to study online testimonials and cross-reference different sources. Thirdly, explore the web presence of the school. Finally, you should pay a visit and analyze your findings.
Begin your work with a quick exercise: open the profile of a particular school you are interested in and sort reviews by date. This will make it easier to detect inconsistencies. Share this approach with another parent in your community.
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