Reviews are kept on site regardless of their age because all reviews are dated. Newer reviews show growth and progress to the school community and prospective students/their families. More recent reviews are generally given more priority across our platform, so older reviews are naturally de-emphasized over time. We also implement a time decay technique with older reviews receiving significantly lower weights than new reviews within survey factors for any grade/ranking. After 3-4 years, reviews will have very little weight in terms of your ranking.
We only remove reviews in the event that they fail to meet our user content guidelines, as set out here: Niche Guidelines for Reporting and Removing Content. There is a “Report” link next to all user generated content on Niche that allows Niche visitors to report any content or reviews, noting the reason. If you believe that any of your reviews violate our guidelines, feel free to report them and they will be manually reviewed and evaluated by our content team. If the reviews violate guidelines, they will be removed within five business days, and if they remain on-site past that point, we have deemed that they do not violate our Guidelines and will remain listed.
My profile shows multiple reviews on the same date (from 2017 or earlier)
Sometimes you will see multiple reviews in different categories on the same date on Niche profiles. These reviews come from an old review format (which we stopped using in 2017) which allowed users to submit multiple text reviews in various categories during the review process. In this old format, the user still only submitted one "out-of-five-star" rating on "Overall Experience", which is what is counted for your Overall Grade. Since then, we have updated the process so that a user can rate the school in multiple categories, but can only leave one text review on "Overall Experience". As all reviews are dated, we show all reviews on-site, including this older format. We do, however, implement a time decay technique, with older reviews receiving significantly lower weights than new reviews within survey factors for any grade/ranking. After 2-3 years, reviews will have very little to no weight in terms of your ranking, so these older format reviews, while they are still listed on-site, do not currently affect any school's ranking in a meaningful way.
We only remove reviews in the event that they fail to meet our user content guidelines, as set out here: Niche Guidelines for Reporting and Removing Content. There is a “Report” link next to all user generated content on Niche that allows Niche visitors to report any content or reviews, noting the reason. If you believe that any of your reviews violate our guidelines, feel free to report them and they will be manually reviewed and evaluated by our content team. If the reviews violate guidelines, they will be removed within three business days, and if they remain on-site past that point, we have deemed that they do not violate our Guidelines and will remain listed.