Thoughts on separate domestic and international forums

[Erin]

I have received an interesting email, and want to share the gist of the email here so that I can get more feedback from our forum members.

The email essentially said something like this:

"My brother, who is a native-born American, came to your forum and saw that many people were freaking out about not getting an 800 on the math section of [whatever test] they took. My brother fell far short of an 800, but he got into a top program. I think your forum gives the wrong impression to domestic visitors since it is frequented by many international students who hope to study in the US. Please create separate forums for domestic and international students."

Truth be told, I will most likely not create separate forums (for various reasons), but I do think a discussion would be good. At the very least, perhaps I could write up an article or short disclaimer, or something like that.

What do you folks think?

[linisha]

Hello,

A disclaimer sounds like a good idea. Although, I would still put an emphasis on trying to get the best scores, whether they are domestic/internationals.
Because, eventually, we are all aiming for a Bachelor's, Masters or PhD. And for this, we need analytical,verbal and quantitative skills to their maximum. That should be our goal, not trying to find out how much one needs to score in order to get an admission.

[roni]

hi
a good idea will be to encourage people to say out their location. for the 'shy' ones, u might consider a broader catagory like 'internatinal'. one solution is to catagorize all members by local/international & give the status at the left pane of every post; but i'm not very comfortable with the idea, donno why.

[Illusionz]

Originally Posted by Erin

"My brother, who is a native-born American, came to your forum and saw that many people were freaking out about not getting an 800 on the math section of [whatever test] they took. My brother fell far short of an 800, but he got into a top program. I think your forum gives the wrong impression to domestic visitors since it is frequented by many international students who hope to study in the US. Please create separate forums for domestic and international students."

Truth be told, I will most likely not create separate forums (for various reasons), but I do think a discussion would be good. At the very least, perhaps I could write up an article or short disclaimer, or something like that.

What do you folks think?

Heck, I'm an international student and I too freaked out when I visited the Math forums ...it's frequented by geniuses!

I think this guy has a valid point but I agree that the solution suggested (having separate forums) wouldn't address the problem. An article/disclaimer sounds like a very good idea. It could address some major misapprehensions about absolute 'good' and 'bad' scores, relative importance of percentiles etc

[arjensteve]

I concur with Illusionz,a disclaimer is probably the best option

[cridamour]

I guess this is in general a problem that comes with asking questions on a forum, everybody is allowed to give answers, and this can lead to useful answers and less useful to useless answers. Add to that the unpredictability of admissions, and many people will have gotten advice that turned out to be proven wrong by their admits afterwards. This would mean that you'd have to put a disclaimer on all forums here, stating that we're no experts, etc., but that should be understood, since it's one of the basic characteristics of a forum... Everybody visiting a forum should know that answers given here are based on persons experiences and by no means the absolute truth... If for some people it takes a disclaimer to realize this, then I regret it, but so be it...

[ish]

I dont feel comfortable about the idea of separate forums. A disclaimer would be the best idea. though as Crida mentioned, it is sad that we need even that at all.