College confidential? More like college CONfidential

College Confidential. What seems like an innocent pair of words is actually one of the largest college counseling websites propagating college paranoia nationwide.

According to its website, College Confidential was created in 2001 by admission counsellors Dave Berry and Sally Rubenstone and parent Roger Dooley to “demystify the college application process.”

It provides college admission, school search and financial aid resources to high school students. By creating free accounts, students are able to log on, get advice on college essays or scholarship opportunities and receive answers to frequently asked questions.

But because College Confidential is a forum-style site, questions and posts sometimes provide misleading information

Although many colleges do have college admissions officers answering questions on the site, most users are not as well-informed and are often other high school students.

The best advice: Skip College Confidential and head to college websites themselves.

Another potential hazard is that some parents are reported to have posed as as high schoolers to draw students away from applying to certain colleges, so that their son or daughter has one less student to worry about when applying. It is troubling to think that many parents would go to such lengths to harm the futures of other students.

Another major part of the site revolves around students posting their GPA and test scores and asking others what their chances are for getting into certain colleges. Parents or even other users reply with false information. For example, they might say that the asker does not have enough SAT subject tests or their GPA was too low while, in fact, the asker is fine on both accounts.

This raises the question on how these threads, called “chance me” threads, actually shape the mindset of a student on which college they should go to.

Additionally, with so many students posting their scores and grades, some users may feel discouraged or embarrassed by their own scores. If there are so many people with supposedly high GPAs, students might not even apply to their top choice of college because they were comparing their scores to others online.

The truth is, most high schools have better resources to answer questions about college. Naviance, for example, has a plethora of statistics and data about colleges and about already-graduated students. (Naviance also has links to College Confidential threads as supplementary information, but these links should be removed as they are not the most accurate of sources).

Though College Confidential is not 100 percent evil, take it for what it is: unverifiable information that can be little more than gossip and speculation.