bgpower wrote:
Hi bb,
Thanks a lot for your work and dedication!
Going over the admissions consulting review section, I wondered whether all reviews are verified or just the ones marked in orange?!
Additionally, as the verification implies that you guys relate the reviews to a particular user name (membership verification) or invoice (actual business between consulting company and candidate), do you think companies can "simulate" false invoices/transactions (after all documents they issue) and so get good reviews?
Just hypothesizing in order to understand the verification process. Once more, I really admire your tremendous job and just want to understand it in a better way!
Thank you!
Thank you for the question.
The admissions consultang reviews are verified in a few ways - none of which depend on the consulting companies really but here is a quick overview:
1. The verified reviews are only the ones that have an orange band (we allow submissions of unverified ones for the time being - these can be created by anyone; however in our experience of auditing reviews, consultants usually don't play that dirty but still, these reviews are not verified)
2. Verification is done either by Score Report (unique score report ID that we pull from GMAC's site and verify or by an edu email address that tends to be hard to get for free and thus impossible to spoof for fake reviews, or by membership for users who have been members over 2 years at the time of writing a review of those who have a certain number of posts - similar to your verification that you have done for the GMAT Pill review; we have verified it by your identity/username since it is unlikely that you have been tainted... which if you have, there is really no way for us to figure it out
)
3. We regularly/continuously do a number of checks/verification that I don't want to publish openly as they will become less effective at spotting fake reviews but you can guess what it is.
4. Something worth mentioning is that we compensate people for reviews - we pay $20 for each. However, we only compensate for verified identity reviews... it is a payment for verifying one's identity really rather than writing a review.
Hope this answers your question and I welcome any suggestions about the reviews or verification. I do ask that you PM so that we don't expose any of the "innovations" publicly to preserve their efficiency.
Best Regards,
BB