Low Ratings

[georgeshahat]

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.

[Mafer R]

Hi @georgeshahat Thank you for sharing this with us. I'll make sure to pass this feedback on to our team. We understand ratings are very important for instructors.

Fernanda Rivera

Community Moderator

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

The policy team will send the copy paste template and say these are our policies and no changes at the moment

[georgeshahat]

That's what exactly happened 

[DamianMcKinnon]

This is the same answer Bella often gives - we'll pass it on. This topic comes up again and again and often around this time of year. And it gets "passed on". The only result is we will end up chasing our tails over this one all over again in about 6 months when nothing happens and the topic is forgotten..

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

@DamianMcKinnon 

That is because the system is full of bugs and we shall thank god that is still working!

Each start of a month, the conversion rates are reset to zeros (all the time) it shall be reset to zeros only for the new month! and they always say "it is just a visual issue" and that is it. 

An issue happened in all search 1 day ago and the search was getting almost zero results and it stayed like this for above 30min I guess! 

Another issue happened 2 days ago and all instructors received a warning that they donot have permissions to look at student statistics, course engagement or conversion rates and they fixed it after alot of questioning about that glitch! 

Some students accidently put a 2 star rating by mistake and I heard that many times here. 

All these issues are still on going and it is happening at regular times. 

[MinervaSingh66]

Hi. I have the same issue. One of my UFB courses is quite popular with business clients (most of my students are from UFB), and I updated it around November 2022. I have received several excellent ratings. Most of my ratings over the past month have been 4+. Indeed I have several 5+ ratings too, where the users have provided comments describing what they liked about the course. I also have two ratings of 1 star (in 1 of them, the user provided no comments). Yet my ratings are declining, and my course will be removed from UFB in a few weeks.  Performance by course attributes is that 97% feel they are learning valuable information, and 85% feel the course is delivering on your expectations. It seems your algorithm has prioritised a few bad reviews over good ones. The whole point of putting in so much effort and keeping the content fresh if the good feedback is simply not acknowledged by what is essentially computer code?

[MaclayAcademy23]

Wow  I taught I was the only one noticing this 

[vick.ptr]

Sometimes there's nothing you can do

[DamianMcKinnon]

If you don't have the power to do anything then yes there's nothing you can do. But there are people drawing a wage right now that supposedly have a responsibility to act. And more often than not they copy and paste a stock standard response. And it' not good enough.

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

That is how you show to public how the system is civilized and deep down there is no credibility 

[RobertBrown028]

As I understand consumer review systems, their primary purpose is to provide perspective customers an honest evaluation of a product: Hopefully for the business, the content provider and the customer, information that promotes a purchase.  A dishonest system, one that has a response bias, will soon cause damage to all.

A secondary benefit of reviews is feedback for the business and content providers to improve their products. Negative comments are especially helpful for this purpose.  However, review systems are not designed to protect or support defective products. Somehow, the review system must weed out poor products, improve others, and enable customers to purchase the right product. Not an easy task.

There are philosophies behind any review system. One is to maximize responses, usually by allowing quick and easy ratings with no comments. This encourages responses of all kinds. Another approach is to mandate written comments. This usually winds up with extremes, high praise and livid negatives, with fewer in-the-middle comments.  The bias of this system is toward the positive.

Amazon.com maximizes ratings, supporting customer input but also allowing them to cheat the system with bogus reviews, both positive and negative. A few of my books, for example, received obvious troll one-star reviews with no recourse to remove them.

I don’t believe the argument that ratings without comments are a disservice to instructors will work. The ratings are for prospective students. And they work as intended.

My suggestion is for the insides of the rating system to be shared with instructors so that a more informed discussion could be held. Perhaps the details must be confidential so it cannot be gamed; yet instructor concerns deserve a more open and informed discussion. Maybe together we can create a stunningly effective system.

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

Sorry but No! The review system which is provided by Udemy is not working as intended and many reviews are manipulated and their policies are vulnerable to these kinds of fake reviews and they accept that as well which is unethical and not credible. 

I have many reviews which are manipulated by haters and may be other competitors too and I provided evidence to them but the policy team is doing nothing but searching for bot activity! Any fake review can be done with a created account and few dollars to pay in a sale day without any need for a bot to do that! Their policies are doing nothing they cannot defend our hard work from dishonest people and fake accounts. 

Another thing which I discovered recently a negative paid review is highly weighted than a paid positive review! It is like we love negative reviews more and we donot respect the 5 stars!!!! 

Thanks to the review system!!! 

[FrankKane]

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@AhmedMagdyMohamed wrote:

Another thing which I discovered recently a negative paid review is highly weighted than a paid positive review!

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How do you know that?

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

@FrankKane 

If you got a 1 star review from paid student (not from a free coupon) , your overall course rating would drop almost 0.5 or more and any badge would fade out (in case you had one).  on other hands,  your course got a 5 stars from paid student, your overall course rating would rank up almost 0.02 or 0.03 maximum and that is true because it has happened several times and I am sure of that. 

[FrankKane]

Oh, by "paid review" you mean by a paid student... I misunderstood!

That makes sense mathematically though, right? A one star review is much further from your existing average than a 5 star would be. I'm not saying that makes it right; if a review is an outlier perhaps the algorithm should treat it as such.

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

@FrankKane  but what I heard from support team they say all ratings are weighted with fair but whatever the algorithm was .. getting a recent 1 star from paid student doesnot mean my course should drop almost 0.5! because that way, any hater can just buy your course twice from different accounts he made and ruins your entire course's rating! that is the whole story I am talking about and instead of listening to me I am being attacked!!! 

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

Finally I found A Community Champion who wants to listen! Thanks @FrankKane !

[FrankKane]

Reviews are a very touchy subject. As instructors we put months of effort into a course, and seeing someone criticize it with a few strokes of their keyboard, perhaps unfairly, can be very very discouraging.

Just to explain why it works that way - if you have 20 5-star reviews and get another 5-star review, it won't change your average at all. A 4-star would only change it to 4.95. ((5*20+4)/21) But a 1-star would change it to 4.8. ((5*20+1)/21) 

What makes it worse is that recency is also a factor, so a brand new one star review counts more than a 3-month-old 5 star review. We don't know the details of how that works, but it explains how a new 1-star review can drag your score down so dramatically.

Everything cuts both ways, though. A new 5-star review also carries more weight than an older 1-star. It's just that if the 5-star is closer to your existing average, it won't move it as much. It's all quite fair on paper, but yes it does open up the possibility of people really torpedo-ing a course with a one-star written review.

Udemy has said below they have no plans of changing this any time soon, so we have to learn to deal with it. If you're in this situation, all you can do is see if you're lucky enough for the review to violate some Udemy policy in which case you might get it removed - and if not, try to drive more reviews to dilute the effect of it. Or simply wait it out - after a few months, it won't affect your score.

Most of your courses have exceptionally high review scores. We tend to fixate on the negative feedback at the expense of the positive!

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

@FrankKane  thanks for clarification now I got my answer after a long journey of misery here. However that makes sense why anyone hates me can ruin my ratings easily and for your recent question how I keep my ratings high like some of my courses now because I report each single 1 star or even 3 star and some of them are removed or expired (after 3 months) but they discovered a new way now to ruin my work without any effect from my reports so I started to complain that is the whole story.. in short.. YES I have enemies in the marketplace and I donot know them but all of them have something in common in their ratings .. in their written feedback and in their way in skipping lessons and finishing the course in a short time. 

Thanks for listening!

[AhmedMagdyMohamed]

@FrankKane  that is not a miracle people! I am just keeping good track of my ratings as much as I can by reporting negative reviews, sharing my free coupons (only for real students in private groups) rather than a spammy public post! and it actually goes well but who said all my courses are high! I have 3.9, 4.2, and of that 4.8s were actually around 4.4 but the negative reviews are expired recently.. when negative reviews are expired my ratings get high.. Why you feel it that way guys!