Introduction
How does Xavier University compare against other universities within 100 miles of campus, from the perspective of student satisfaction? Has Xavier received more positive reviews than negative? Have colleges as a whole seen positive trends on satisfaction rates among current students? I scraped Rate My Professor websites for the following universities to compare reviews that current and past students have posted about their respective colleges.
Miami University
Ohio University
Sinclair Community College
The Ohio State University
University of Cincinnati
University of Dayton
University of Kentucky
Xavier University
I also scraped the following variables from each university’s respective website:
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| school name | Name of the University |
| review content | Content of the review |
| review date | Date the reviewer posted the review |
| review emotion | Attitude the reviewer expressed towards the university (awesome, average, or awful) |
| review rating | The score the reviewer gave to the University (on a scale from 1-5) |
Distribution of Ratings for Each University
The visualization below shows the distribution of ratings for each university. As we can see, Ohio University has the widest range of scores, while the University of Kentucky has the smallest range. It seems that many college students have similar attitudes towards UK; whereas, the opposite is true of OU. It appears that Xavier overall was pretty average compared to other universities; it didn’t have a surprisingly high median rating or large IQR, it was just fairly average. It is noteworthy, in my opinion, that this could look a lot different if the outlier was excluded from Xavier’s review data. After I looked into it a little more, though, the 1.7 rating was attributed to Xavier not meeting standards the reviewer had based on other friends’ reviews. This person also left a review in November of 2021, which was the weird semester when the University was cracking down on social gatherings of 10 or more people both on and off campus. There could be a correlation between the low rating of this score and the date it was published. I will analyze this relationship between rating and time in the next couple of visualizations.
Distribution of Reviews by Month
The visualization below shows the distribution of ratings for each university by month. As we can see, May, April, and November had the widest range of scores. This could be attributed to the fact that students are more likely to post about the experiences they had at the end of a spring or fall semester while it is still fresh in their minds. In the summertime or at the beginning of a semester, a student is probably less likely to post about an experience they had because they have not had the proper amount of time yet to formulate a judgement. This could possibly explain why there was only one rating for each of the months of June, July, and September.
Distribution of Reviews by Year
The visualization below shows the average ratings students gave their colleges broken down by year. While some colleges, such as the University of Cincinnati, only had reviews from 2023, these charts are helpful when comparing trends in ratings per year. For a college like Sinclair, they were trending downwards in ratings but were able to turn things around in 2023, upping their average rating to almost a 3.75 out of 5. It made me happy to see that Xavier’s average rating has only increased over the past three years, reaching an all-time high of 4 in 2023. While I didn’t scrape data going super far back, it is interesting to see the positive trends in ratings that most colleges have been experiencing going from 2022 into 2023. The one exception to this is Miami University, whose average rating went from ~3.7 down to a 3. I tried to research if Miami has undergone any significant changes since the start of 2023 and all that I could find was a new “Miami Plan 2023” that the university announced will go into effect in Fall 2023. While it is not currently affecting students, perhaps some were upset about the curriculum changes that are coming up in the fall semester. For more information about this, you can visit the following website: https://www.miamioh.edu/liberal-ed/faculty-staff/curricular-changes-faq/.
Distribution of Emojis per University
The fun visualization below shows the total number of emojis each university received on Rate My Professor. The happy looking emojji with the sunglasses signifies a student who had an “awesome” experience with the college; the middle emoji with the horizontal mouth represents a student who had an “average” experience at the school; the upset emoji on the far right represents a student expressing their sadness at having an “awful” experience at the school. The University of Dayton had the least amount of awful emojis while also having the most amount of awesome emojis. Xavier, OU, SCC, and OSU all tied for having the second-highest number of awesome emojis in their reviews, so it is safe to assume that students at these schools were overall pretty pleased by their experiences at the campus. On the other hand, the University of Kentucky by far had the smallest number of awesome emojis and the largest number of awful emojis, so one could conclude that students are very dissatisfied with the school.
Sentiment Analysis
I performed a sentiment analysis to compare the positivity and negativity scores for each of the Universities’ reviews. After playing around with it, I initially decided to filter it to only show words that appeared at least 2 times in the reviews for each school. It was pretty difficult to read the words, which is why in the next visual I increased the cutoff to 3 repeats.
As you can see above, it is much easier to read the chart when you compare positivty and negativity scores for words that appeared at least 3 times in each school’s reviews. The two negative words that were repeated were hard and horrible at Miami University and Xavier University, respectively. After looking into Miami’s two reviews that repeated the word “hard”, I should have omitted them because these were the following reviews:
This school just care about your money and it doesn’t consider your effort to study hard. Also they treat you like garbage just because they need to always have the last word.
Miami’s culture deeply follows “Work hard, play hard.” Most students are strongly dedicated to their courses throughout the week. Once the weekend rolls around students flip this on its head, forgetting academics for the social aspects of campus. If you want to go to a school where both socializing and academics are honored Miami is the place to be.
The first review rated Miami as awful, with a score of 1.4 because clearly the student never felt valued. The second review; however, rated Miami as awesome, with a score of 4.6 because the student had positive experiences both in the academic and social realms of the school. In both instances, though, the word “hard” was not used in the context you would think judging from the chart above.
Looking at the three Xavier reviews that repeated the word “horrible”, it was actually comical to discover that all 3 students were talking about how horrible the roads are off-campus! The three students all gave Xavier average ratings of 3.2, 3.5, and 3.6, so at least they overall had positive things to say about the university!
The professors are really willing to help you and are interested in your success there are a lot of programs that are freely available to help if your struggling as well. Cleaney ave is horrible to drive on and parking is limited when you get on campus. Because of the small size it can be difficult to make friends if you aren’t very outgoing.
Great school and you get what you pay for, for the most part. Surrounding area sucks and all the roads are horrible. Campus is great.
Pros: Most professors actually care about your success The campus looks like a park and is well kept Smaller class size BASKETBALL SEASON! Cons: High costs with or without aid CLENEAY AVE IS HORRIBLE TO DRIVE OVER Limited Parking DIFFICULT TO MAKE REAL FRIENDS AS A COMMUTER Lack of Diversity THE STAIRS THAT LEAD UP TO ELET HALL
The accuracy hurts on that last part of the third review…the stairs that lead up to Elet Hall are every student’s worst nightmare. I had an 8:00am Psychology lab in the Armory on Friday mornings during the first semester my Freshman year. You can imagine how embarrassed I was to be 15 minutes late to class on the first day because 1) I couldn’t find the Armory anywhere on campus, and 2) By the time I had finally found where the building was, I had to book it across the street, through the old O’Connor parking lot, and up the bajillion steps that led up to the Psych buildings. And here I am now, four years later completing my last homework assignment, reminiscing about those trecherous stairs…