OTA’s Relentless Commitment to Transparency

Mike Richardson on Nov 6, 2020

We just passed a monumental milestone, of 200,000 reviews posted on our website

In other words, Amazon isn’t the only place you can find a lot of reviews.  I did a little research and the largest number of reviews I came across at Amazon were for these microfiber bed sheets with 155,017 reviews at the time of writing.  Putting aside speculation about fake reviews, that’s a lot!

But not as many as we have, which is 210,418 at the time of writing.  These are post-class satisfaction surveys from students who have joined the academy, conducted at the end of each asset-class in the education program, both on-location and online.  At the time of writing, we have served more than 80,000 students so far and each typically does between 1 and 5 classes, so that’s how we have accumulated this number of reviews. 

Here are more details:

  • We upload these to our website reviews page every week on Friday.
  • The scoring ratings are not filtered in any way at all, none are edited and none are removed.  The average scoring rating percentages are calculated from the cumulative database.
  • The free-form comments that we also ask students for as a part of this process are necessarily edited, only to remove any explicit or implicit monetary claims or other representations that we are careful not to convey.

We are very proud of our stellar reviews.

  • 76.43% of students have given us a 5-star rating
  • 20.56% have given us a 4-star rating
  • So that’s 97% who have given us a 4-star rating or better.  Only 3% have given us 3-star rating or less and it is our relentless commitment to find out what didn’t work and how we can rectify it.
  • The average rating is 4.72/5 or 94.4%
  • There are 3,627 pages of free-form comments at the time of writing, going back to September 2002, so 18 years and counting so far and most recently from November 6, 2020.  It takes us a little time to carefully review the free-form comments (as described above), so these lag by about a week

By the way, that average rating is better than those microfiber bed sheets at Amazon!  They score 4.5/5, although in their “How are Ratings Calculated?” drop down link, they comment that they don’t use a “simple average”.  Hmmm.  We do use a simple average as that is the most transparent.

Read for yourself what our students say about our education support and community.  This is our relentless commitment to transparency.