What It Measures
The AllPros Score reflects student satisfaction, and nothing else. It's built entirely from verified reviews (see Review Integrity for how we confirm those are real). It isn't an editorial opinion, a staff rating, or anything AllPros adds on top. It's what students actually said, aggregated into a single number.
It Cannot Be Bought
This is worth saying plainly, on its own, before anything else: no plan, payment, or account status changes this score. A creator on a paid plan gets run through the exact same algorithm as one who isn't. Category doesn't matter, whether it's day trading, options, or anything else. Where a review came from doesn't matter either. The only input, ever, is what students actually shared about their experience. There's no upgrade path to a higher number.
How It's Calculated
The score isn't a flat average of every star rating ever left. Three things shape it:
1. Recency weighting. Older reviews count for less over time. Imagine a course that was excellent two years ago, full of five-star reviews back then, but has quietly gotten worse since: outdated material, a mentor who stopped showing up. If we just averaged everything forever, that course could coast indefinitely on praise that no longer reflects reality. Recency weighting means the score tracks what's true now, not what was true once.
2. A frequency stabilizer. Creators who receive reviews regularly get a more stable, reliable score. Without this, a course could get three five-star reviews in one lucky week, jump to a near-perfect score, and then go quiet for months while that number sits there unchanged and increasingly meaningless. A steady, ongoing stream of reviews carries more weight than a rare burst, because it actually reflects an ongoing pattern rather than a moment.
3. Neutral seed reviews for new creators. A brand-new course with zero reviews doesn't start at a meaningless number, and it also doesn't start unfairly exposed to a single early reviewer having outsized power over it. We seed it with a neutral starting point, so a new creator isn't stuck looking untrustworthy just because they haven't accumulated reviews yet. As real reviews come in, the seed's influence fades out gradually until it's gone completely and the score is entirely earned.
The Four Categories Are Separate
When you read a review, you'll also see it broken down by Curriculum, Support, Value for Money, and Community. Those exist to help you understand why a course scored the way it did, so you're not left guessing what a single number is actually describing. But they don't feed into the AllPros Score itself. The score is calculated only from the reviewer's overall rating; the four categories are context you can read alongside it, not inputs the algorithm touches.
Why It's Built This Way
The whole point is to protect two things at once. A brand-new creator shouldn't be punished with a broken-looking score just because they haven't built up a review history yet. And no creator, new or established, should be able to game the number, whether by paying for a better plan, timing a burst of reviews, or picking which category looks most favorable. The score is deliberately slow to move and hard to manipulate. That's not a limitation, it's the entire reason it's worth trusting in the first place.
