❗️**Announcement** Course ratings suddenly dropped or dissapeared❗️
Comments
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That's not how it works @Voider2049 . In that case the ten most recent reviews are used regardless of age. See
https://teach.udemy.com/course-reviews-101/
Something is absolutely very wrong with the review system. Ratings changed instantly across the board to seemingly random values. Udemy has acknowledged there is an issue.
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"Udemy has acknowledged there is an issue"
Udemy often doesn't know their own rules. I've had some conversations with the support where they needed multiple staff members to figure out the platform's rules.
But after looking into my reviews I agree that it looks odd, as old reviews are completely gone in two coursse but not in the other. Not just greyed out but deleted, this is new to me too.
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From : https://teach.udemy.com/course-reviews-101/
How is my course rating calculated?
Udemy takes all the student ratings left on a given course in the last 90 days and aggregates them into a single course rating. That rating is displayed on the course landing page and on “course cards” across the website. Rather than using a simple mathematical average of all ratings, the course rating calculation gives more weight to reviews from its most engaged students. When assessing a student’s engagement, we consider things like course consumption, the recency of their rating, and the length of their written review.0 -
Thanks for letting us know. I was getting panic because this is effecting my multiple courses
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Mine actually went up? Am I the only one? I looked at sales of that affected one course and the increase in rating on that course did not lead to any additional sales, so no need to be jealous, it is a terrible course anyways and does not need to have a 5.0 rating. I would think a mass e-mail to all instructors when they first realized this might be a problem would have prevented a lot of pissed off instructors. We reached peak udemy 2 years ago and seeing it slowly fade away to mediocracy is heartbreaking.
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Just like Lindsay, some of my older, lower-quality courses have increased in ratings to 4.8, while my newer, better courses have gone down in ratings. However, there haven't been any additional sales or increased consumption because of this. Similarly to Lindsay, my peak was two years ago; after plateauing, this year my performance is declining.
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I've lost one of my highest-rated badges because of this. Not fixed yet.
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Me
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Similar experience to several instructors here. Some courses went to 5. Some went to 0. Many somewhere in between. No major change in sales
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A large portion of my courses received a 5.0 review, but sales did not increase.
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My third course which I released in July had a 4,6 rating out of 4 reviews, which earned me the hot and new badge as well as one of the top spots in search results. The bug lead to the course showing 0 ratings and loosing the badge, also it dropped dramatically in the list of search results. So i did not get a single enrollment in the course since the bug occurred...
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@Abderrazzaq Kharroubi @Voider2049 No. I don't think it is like that. Or maybe the period is less than one year. I have a course that is less than a year old. It went live last November I think, and it suffered as well. Within 5 minutes, average rating dropped from 4.3 to 3.4. And it does not even make any sense. I mean look at overall student feedback. 48% gave 5 stars and 29% gave 4 stars or 4.5 stars. That totals up to 77% reviews which gave the course 4 stars or higher. But overall average rating results out to be 3.4? What kind of arithmetic is this? It does not make any sense. It is definitely a bug and Udemy is super slow to fix it. Same is true for my other courses as well. Arithmetic makes zero sense.
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Hey Udemy, if there is no easy way to fix whatever broke, can you at least restore our ratings to what they were prior to September 18 and freeze them there while you figure it out?
I can still see our ratings history in our dashboard, so you have that data.
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@FrankKane - I guess this is what happens when you lay off 20% of the company. And it probably wasn't 20% of the lowest paid employees. I imagine a scary number of software engineers were cut too.
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Thank you !!!
I thought it was a reset in the scores...
I hope it gets fixed soon.
Thank you very much
Ricardo / brqx0 -
@FrankKane this is a great idea. Putting a "placeholder" historical value while they try to fix the underlying problem does make sense.
I'm sure it's something to do with the review calculation algorithm. In recent weeks, I've noticed extreme good/bad reviews affect the overall review score much more, so I've been having this "whiplash" before (although not this extreme, naturally). It seems someone has been tinkering with the algorithm, but this time maybe input a zero too many in some field.
Either way, a temporary fix would definitely be appreciated while they sort out the deeper issue - having bad reviews in many courses affects not just instructors, but gives a bad impression of the platform as a whole.
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Thank you for the support
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I am eagerly waiting for it to be fixed. A course with an almost 4.5 rating is now at 2.99! I was very surprised and heartbroken to see that. I hope the issue gets fixed soon.
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This is abysmal service by Udemy , I too have had a course drop to 0 stars from 4.81 overnight.
In addition I have courses that I unpublished years ago now receiving 5 star ratings, Udemy has a serious star rating issue!!
And this new chat "Alex" is a royal pain as it cannot understand the question either, has anyone found a way to contact support other than Alex ?
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Hello @Voider2049, but I am new here, my course is just about 6 months (so are the reviews) but my rating has changed too.
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OMG, why didn't Udemy send an email telling us about this not so small issue? I just sent a message to the last person that purchased my course asking them about the terrible review they must have left for my rating to plummet and how I can fix his experience, I'm so embarrassed now. Please, Udemy, let us know when this happens before we see it and make fools out of ourselves, thank you in advance.
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I wonder if testing code before pushing it to production could be an idea.
Or maybe, don't do it on Fridays
If only there were best practices to follow, but alas.6 -
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Agree with @FrankKane. Clearly atleast historical data is there and so that can be used. Ideally, I'd expect the previous version of the software release to fix it if it is an issue with new release.
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Some of mine are up, go figure.
Some courses up, most down from 4.6-8 to 3.5 or no reviews.
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@ScottDuffy I don't think considering only last 3 months of data is a good idea. Some great courses are late in the game and they never see the light. I do have one such course. Many ordinary courses could be doing well just because they were there at the right time. So, these courses that came late have fewer enrollments and couple of bad reviews in the last 3 months is all that is needed to kill them completely. 3 months is a short period and that cannot decide relevancy of a course. May be it should be 1 year. Just frequent updates with "shallow" explanations of newer features to the course doesn't necessarily mean it is relevant. It is the depth that is crucial and that makes great learners (or great software engineers in software domain). For a programming language course like Java, a highly in-depth World-class course created a decade ago that doesn't have newer features is much better than a good course with newer features explained through simple hello world examples.
This 3 month's period for calculating average rating is another concern with this new ratings issue we are seeing now. Rating of my main course dropped from 4.5+ to 4.3 due to the issue. What if I get couple of bad reviews in the next few days and my rating drops even further.
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@Thor Rigorous testing is a MUST. Even in small startups that follow 3 week release cycles, code is frozen after 2 weeks and the entire last week is just testing by testing team. So, that last week the testing is done on very high quality data that is very similar to production data. If the automated tests flag discrepancies, then the necessary tickets will be created. In a startup I worked with long time ago, I think releases were done on Thursday (or may be Tuesday) and that would make it easy on developers' life if there is any major issue.
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There's now a public article on the issue on Class Central:
https://www.classcentral.com/report/udemy-course-ratings-glitch/
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This surprises me….no official incident according to the Udemy Status ? 😨 https://status.udemy.com/
Don't know if I agree with this…
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