How Buddy scores universities

Choosing a university is one of the biggest decisions a family makes together, and most advice treats it as a ranking exercise. We do not.

University Buddy starts from who the student actually is: what they enjoy, how they work, what the whole family cares about, and what everyone says in their own words. The right university is the one that fits this student and this family, not simply the one highest on a league table.

This page explains how we score and rank universities, in plain language. If anything here is unclear, write to erik@zplus.ae and you will get an answer from the founder.

Your conversation. The chat is the primary source. What the student says about subjects, places, worries and hopes shapes everything downstream. Any university your family names yourselves is always assessed and always shown, with its honest score, even when it does not make the top five.

What matters to you. You rate the criteria that matter to your family, from course content and academic reputation to cost, distance from home and campus life, and you tell us your deal-breakers. Those ratings drive the weighting: the things you care most about count for more.

Optional tests. Buddy offers a set of short, established instruments: an interest profiler built on the RIASEC framework, a personality profile built on the Big Five framework using a public-domain item bank, plus strengths, learning-style and values snapshots. Tests are supplementary. They sharpen the picture when you take them, they are cited by name when they influence a recommendation, and they are never required.

Documents you choose to share. A school report or test certificate can add useful evidence. We only use a document after you have confirmed what we read in it, and it never overrides what you told us in conversation.

Your whole family. Up to five people can complete the questionnaire: the student, parents, even a sibling, friend or teacher. Each perspective is weighted by role, with the student's voice carrying the most weight. Where the family disagrees, we say so warmly and let you talk it through; we never paper over it.

Every candidate university is scored against 23 criteria, each from 0 to 100, and those scores are weighted by what your family said matters. The maths behind your shortlist is visible in your report: you can see exactly which criteria drove each recommendation.

Reputation, done honestly. We never worship a single league table. A university's standing is a composite of graduate outcomes, student satisfaction, employability, research strength and external rankings. For US universities we go further: their standing comes from the US Department of Education's College Scorecard, which publishes real admission rates, graduate earnings and completion rates. We use that instead of world rankings for US institutions, because world rankings systematically under-represent excellent US undergraduate colleges.

Two independent looks. Your recommendation is produced twice, independently: once by our scoring engine working over verified data, and once by live research into your family's specific situation. The two views are then reconciled. Anything one side found that the other cannot verify is checked against sources or raised with you as a question, never silently included.

Honest gaps. Where our data is thin, you see it. A fee we have not verified shows as being verified, never as an invented number. Specific claims in your report carry their sources.

Each recommended university carries a classification:

Reach. Entry is competitive for most applicants; worth aiming for, not counted on.

Match. Comfortably within the range where students with a profile like this are regularly admitted.

Safety. Admission is very likely, protecting the downside of an ambitious list.

For US universities these classifications are grounded in real published admission rates from College Scorecard. Elsewhere they are indicative, based on a university's standing among its national peers, until verified entry requirements confirm them; your report labels them accordingly.

Your shortlist also carries a balance note. Five reaches is brave but risky; five safeties undersells the student. Either way, we say so.

We never invent a fact. If we do not hold a verified number, you see "being verified", not a guess dressed up as certainty.

We never take money from universities. No university can pay to appear in a shortlist, and no recommendation is sponsored.

We never inflate a score. A university your family named appears with its honest score, even when that score is unflattering.

We never let a test decide. Assessments add colour and evidence; they never gate a recommendation.

We never silently exclude on budget. Affordability is surfaced clearly against your budget, and the decision stays with your family.

We never hide uncertainty. Where our two independent looks disagree, or a detail is still being checked, your report says exactly that.

Founding families shape the product. Early families give structured feedback at several points in the journey, and that feedback directly reorders what we build next.

Data is reviewed, not just collected. Key facts in our catalogue are corroborated across multiple independent sources, and anything that drifts lands in a review queue rather than being overwritten blind.

Freshness is scheduled. US outcome data refreshes weekly from College Scorecard, university narrative profiles are re-checked on a 90-day cycle, and automated health checks run daily so a broken data source is noticed by us before it misleads you.