It’s a long-standing tradition for students to receive grades based on how hard they work in class, but now the tables have turned. College Prowler, a popular collegiate website, allows students to rate and review their school’s work ethic.

N.C . State’s Internet report card ranges from an ‘A’ in athletics to a ‘C+’ in parking. About 640 individuals have written reviews about the University and their experiences with campus life.

But is this site reliable and useful for both prospective students and university leaders and policymakers?

Dining and transportation – two of the biggest concerns with N.C. State addressed on the site – will actually be seeing improvements over the course of the upcoming school years.

The recent Campus Mobility Plan seeks to provide a more effective transportation system for students through transit changes, such as the Wolfline buses and their routes.

According to Emerson Barker, a senior in political science and the Student Senate president pro tempore, revising board bucks to be ‘dining dollars’ that can roll-over into the next year is another way student concerns are being taken into account.

“It’s something that [the Student Senate] and dining had kind of talked about because it is currently annoying and it doesn’t make any sense,” Barker said.

The quality of dining hall food, however, is reviewed on the site as generally “adequate but not amazing” and “OK but repetitive.”

Denise Suter, a junior in bioprocessing science, believes some of the reviews on College Prowler are also debatable.

“I don’t think there’s really much on campus that I’d give an ‘F.’ That’s pretty harsh, that would be downright terrible,” Suter said.

One ‘F’ review on the site criticized State’s financial aid.

“My experience with the financial options is not good. I am working on a graduate certificate in e-learning. N.C. State does not offer any financial aid to students unless you are in a degree program. There is no consideration for the continuing adult student,” Suter said.

Suter added that the site doesn’t explicitly state where its statistics come from and how updated they are.

“After taking a statistics class here, I kind of don’t really trust much of the statistics that I see,” Suter said. “You don’t really know how many people they ask or who they’re asking.”

She added, however, that the site lists interesting places students like to go and student demographics.

College Prowler’s quick stats of N.C. State’s diversity state the majority of students, 77 percent, are white. Asian Americans make up 5 percent, and African Americans are 9 percent of the student body.

The College Board profile of N.C. State, which gets the majority of its information from the colleges themselves, confirms the statistic that white students make up 77 percent of the population, with the statistics for minorities differing by a percent or two.

Thomas Stafford, vice chancellor for Student Affairs, disagrees with the claim that State is not diverse, having seen the changes it’s undergone over the years.

“I’ve worked at State for 41 years total and I’ve seen the University change a great deal,” Stafford said. “We’ve gotten bigger, we’ve renovated buildings… we’re also a much more diverse campus with almost as many women as men and of all racial categories. When I started to work here, it was mostly a white male place.”

Stafford said the website can be a reliable source for the student perspective, though, given how students point out problems he’s continuously noticed.

“I would say that, as long as I’ve been here, parking has always been a problem and it does get a low grade [on College Prowler],” Stafford said.

“We could pave over the Court of Carolinas and make it a parking deck,” Barker said. “But it would be horrible and we still wouldn’t have enough parking.”

Suter added that the letter grading designation made her want to look at UNC and Duke’s profiles to see how they compared with State.

According to the website, N.C. State’s acceptance rate is about 56 percent with the admissions difficulty being ‘average.’ UNC has a 32 percent acceptance rate and their admissions difficulty is ranked as ‘hard.’ Duke shows a 19 percent rate and a ‘very hard’ admissions difficulty.

“People have that saying where, ‘It’s harder to get into UNC but once you get in it’s easier to graduate. It’s easier to get into State but it’s harder to graduate,'” Suter said.

“I’d love to see us getting even higher grades on the [College Prowler] report cards, either by improving services or by doing a better job communicating all the work that goes into them so that people understand them better,” Barker said.

“Part of my leadership philosophy is that everyone should look for ways to improve,” Stafford said.