How Course Report et. al manipulate their reviews
+ still no word from Le Wagon's founders
We’ve been looking at Course Provider, Switchup and Career Karma — who boast exceptional scores for Le Wagon’s bootcamp.
A post we shared on Reddit received the following replies:
In addition, we noticed that Course Provider by default lists “Recommended” reviews, and not all reviews in the order in which they are left. We searched the first FORTY pages and couldn’t find any negative or neutral reviews for Le Wagon.
Which is why you won’t see reviews like this one, left as recently as December 9th 2023, unless you filter by ‘most recent’ and keep scrolling:
https://www.coursereport.com/schools/le-wagon?shared_review=65160#reviews
And even neutral reviews are nicely tucked away:
https://www.coursereport.com/schools/le-wagon?shared_review=65265#reviews
(We’ve not linked to 2 of the above reviews to protect the anonymity of the reviewers).
Switchup doesn’t let you link to individual reviews at all.
And Career Karma only seems to display a couple of reviews with 1, 2 or 3 stars.
More evidence that the review websites, incentivised to keep reviews high for the bootcamps they are advertising (*cough* commission for referrals *cough*), go above-and-beyond to promote good reviews, and filter out the not-so-good.
Still waiting on a response from Le Wagon’s founders
Ten days ago, we reached out to Le Wagon’s three founders for more information around the data they proudly advertise.
A couple of days later, we noticed they began to make some subtle changes to their website & outcomes reports.
But we received no response to our email. So we tried again.
At time of publishing, still no reply. We’ll keep you posted.