Low Ratings

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Low Ratings

I think that in order to protect the instructors from low ratings without any justification, udemy should not accept 1 or 2 stars rating unless the student provides justification about his/her rating.

This will help the instructors know their mistakes and correct them according to the students feedback.

 

58 Replies

@MinervaSingh66 

I doubt that the udemy themselves know anything about the rating algorithm. I opened that case several times with the support team and their replies contradicted each other. Some of them say that reviews with free coupons are the same as reviews without coupons and we all know that is not right. The reviews for free coupons are lower in weight and the support member said the wrong answer. Maybe it is a single fault mistake, but I raised my concern several times because that rating system encourages sick-heads and poor minds and jealous people to just ruin your work with a 1 star review! But no one is listening. You will keep struggling and you will get no answer from the platform.

We have to try. Remember, at the end of the day, Udemy is now a publicly listed company. We are right in seeking transparency and consideration for instructor welfare. That is the whole point of ESG ratings. 

I completely agree with this....not to prevent me from getting lower ratings, but to prevent all the accidental 1-2 star ratings. I've reached out to SO MANY STUDENTS about low ratings, and every single one of them responded that the rating was an accident (or they don't know how it happened), and they updated it.

Very true and very logical dear. This has been brought to notice of Udemy earlier too but for some reason it does not fit into their policies 

GuilhermeMP
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

As stated before,every review has a degree of subjectivity, and this happens for all instructors

FrankKane
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Wow @AhmedMagdyMohamed way to go with throwing out accusations of racism, and then following it up with ageist remarks. That sort of behavior isn't acceptable here, or anywhere else. Perhaps you could offer some more constructive feedback, such as how you earned ratings of 4.9 - 5.0 on some of your courses. We must have a lot to learn from you about how to create some of the best content on the platform, and how to motivate students to write positive reviews. Please share your tips with us!

 

Look, EVERY review system is fatally flawed. They are ALL subject to gaming and the biases of the reviewers. But like it or not, students - which are Udemy's customers, and our customers - expect them as a tool in making a buying decision. If I were in charge, I'd eliminate reviews entirely in favor of some objective engagement-based metric from the behavior of paid students. But I'm not, and reviews are here to stay.

 

Bad reviews hurt my feelings too. That's why I don't look at reviews at all, or respond to them. Only if I notice a course is doing noticeably worse than my others will I dig into reviews looking for actionable feedback on what's wrong with it. And if there is some, I act on it. Otherwise, I accept that reviews are for students more than they are for me, and that the system is about as good as it can reasonably get.

 

It's been awhile since Udemy talked about how the review system works, but there are quite a few nuances that help us out you might not know about. The last we heard, written reviews carry more weight in your review average than reviews with no text - so those one-star reviews with no text may not have useful information for you, but they also don't count much. And reviews don't count at all after a few months, so even if you are hammered with unfair one-stars, they will eventually go away and let you start with a clean slate again. I think Udemy thought this all through a lot better than some of the huge tech companies, like Amazon.

 

Suggesting mandatory written comments on one and two star reviews is not an unreasonable idea. But it would bias reviews toward the positive, as it would introduce friction to negative reviews, and make the reviews less helpful to students as a result. "OK then, require comments on all reviews" you may say - but there are just too many courses on the marketplace, and reviews are spread too thinly as a result. Udemy needs to drive all the reviews they can get, in order to get a meaningful measure of every course's quality from learners. I appreciate Udemy's stance on this, and it's really an impossible situation.

 

Anyhow, my advice as always is to focus on what you can control. If your course is getting hammered by bad reviews, there's probably a reason why. Make your course better. Stop offering it for free and making it easy for trolls to access. And if you really think there is a concerted attack against your course from competitors - find evidence of it, and present it to the policy team. Never in the history of this community have I seen anyone actually have evidence of an attack from competing instructors, though. More often it goes back to Larry's point of how we want to blame someone else for bad things. Larry's a very wise man by the way. Y'all should listen.

@FrankKane  Actually all the champions here deserve to be treated the same you treat us if we ask for something you donot like.. So if you see it is racist to say "old man" then let it be! and I donot care at all!

I have been attacked, accused of really bad things I never did and your community let it go so I will let it go the same you let your attacks go. Good Luck with your day, week, month and year and your career. 

FrankKane
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Perhaps it's a language or cultural barrier thing, but in the US dismissing someone as an "old man" is considered insulting.

@FrankKane  I am sorry I donot mean that but Lawrence accused me and said alot against me in an archived thread I am saying " old man " because I donot know what to call him after all his accusations to me . I was just asking for something!!!

GuilhermeMP
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

Here in Brazil too

Three major difficulties make this an ineffective exchange. One is there isn't a common set of facts, partly due to some instructors defining that reviews are for their benefit. Without a common understanding of review systems, how they are created and how they are evaluated, common understanding is not going to happen, nor the acceptance of opposing viewpoints.

The second problem is that for some, this is an emotional issue. Logical responses only incite more intense emotions; which is happening here. 

The third is the different desired outcome. Some want a system that eliminates valid and invalid low ratings to benefit instructors while others support a system that maximizes student input. This difference in goals is the natural result of defining the issue differently. N'er the twain shall meet. 

Perhaps a fruitful discussion would be how to productively handle the sting of a low review. Not looking at them until a course is not performing well seems like a good idea. I've learned to do that with my books.

But I do want to acknowledge the pain some of my fellow instructors are feeling. I go through periods when I think about returning to book writing sooner rather than later to avoid some of the built-in Udemy frustrations.

 

 

Robert Brown, Ph.D.
Unique insights for personal & business success

Community Champions donot seem they encourage fruitful discussions here.

If they are treating themselves like Udemy's Gods and accusing anybody at anytime, they wont give a chance for a constructive feedback. Admins here are serving them too which makes the situation even worse. If you want respect, you have to show some respect. 

 

Absolutely true 

Hum, this makes sense, for multiple reasons:

1. Participants are encouraged to reflect on their experience, instead of just suddenly giving a certain rating.

2. It discourages mean instructors who have competing topics from manipulating ratings. Though, I would imagine this doesn't happen as it would be super obvious!!

fair enough, agree.

An excellent idea; it would be interesting to see the reasons, and check how many are able to justify their rating! In 20 years of lecturing, I have found that students are at times impulsive and emotional in regard to rating lecturers and educators. 

LawrenceMMiller
Community Champion Community Champion
Community Champion

@CarolCharma086  No one ever needs to "justify" their ratings. All ratings, whether of courses, lectures, hotels, restaurants, movies, or books, are ALL an emotional response. Every public speaker knows, or should know, that it is not the intellectual content of a presentation, but how the presentation makes the audience feel that is what will be remembered. 

 

Much of this discussion is aimed at changing the rating system to alter how students rate, to make them more rational, or justify their ratings. Forget it! You can't do it. No one has ever done it. Instead, the instructor should recognize how their presentation makes the student feel and causes them to want to give a good rating. You have to change how you present, not how the student rates. One you have control of, the other you can only complain about. One is useful, the other is useless. 

 

Lawrence M. Miller
Author/Instructor
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