Surveying thousands of students on hundreds of campuses is a mammoth undertaking, but the launch of our online student survey, available 24/7, has made it possible for students to send us their thoughts anytime and anywhere.

In fact, almost all (99.5 percent) of our student surveys are now completed online. We've surveyed anywhere from 26 men at Deep Springs College (100 percent of the student body) to more than 1,000 collegians at such colleges as Hofstra University, University of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

So how do we do it? First, we notify our administrative contacts at the schools we'd like to survey. We depend upon these contacts for assistance either in informing the student body of our online survey, or, if the school opts for a paper version, in identifying common, high-traffic areas on campus at which to survey students, and to help us make any necessary arrangements as required by campus policies. In recent years, an increasing number of schools have chosen to send an e-mail to the entire student body about the availability of the online survey; in some cases this has yielded astonishing response rates.

Surveying truly is a continuous process. Students submit surveys online from all schools in the book and they can submit them at any time (though our site will accept only one survey from a student per academic year per (it's not possible to "stuff" the ballot box, as it were). We also officially survey students at each school in The Best 376 Colleges at least once every three years. We conduct these surveys more often than that if the colleges request that we do so (and we can accommodate that request) or if we believe it is necessary for one reason or another. And of course, surveys we receive from students outside of their schools' normal survey cycles are always factored into the subsequent year's ranking calculations, so that the surveying process truly is ongoing, and our pool of student survey data is continuously refreshed.

The survey has more than 80 questions in four main sections: "About Yourself," "Your School's Academics/Administration," "Students," and "Life at Your School." We ask about all sorts of things, from "How many out-of-class hours do you spend studying each day?" to "How do you rate your campus food?" Most questions offer an answer choice on a five-point scale: students fill in one of five boxes on a grid with headers varying by topic (e.g. a range from "Excellent" to "Awful"). All of our 62 ranking lists tallies are based on students' answers to one or more of these questions with a five-point answer scale. Some questions on the survey are open-ended and offer students the opportunity to answer with narrative responses.

Once the surveys have been completed and the responses stored in our database, we tally the results. Our methodology and the math by which we calculate our ranking results are quite simple. Each college is given a score (similar to a GPA) for its students' answers to each multiple-choice question. These scores enable us to compare student opinion from college to college. They are the sole factors that determine which schools make it onto our 62 ranking lists. Whether or not a school makes it onto any of our lists—and at what rank—is determined by what students report to us about their experiences. (The ranking lists are not based on our opinion of the schools or how we rate them.) See The Princeton Review's College Rankings for info on what each ranking list is based on.

The findings from our student surveys also determine the "Students Say" lists we feature in the sidebars on our school profiles. These lists report the topics on the surveys that students at each school agreed about the most. Our profiles are also packed with comments from students (all text in quotes in the profiles comes directly from a surveyed student). Student quotations in our profiles are not chosen for their extreme nature, humor or unique perspective. Rather, they are chosen because they represent the sentiments expressed by the majority of survey respondents from the college; or, they illustrate one side or another of a mixed bag of student opinion, in which case there will also appear a counterpoint within the text. And, of course, if testimonials accomplish this and are noteworthy for their wittiness, they'll be very likely to make it into the text.

Our ranking lists, school profiles and the student comments we share in them seek to accomplish that which a college admissions view book by its very nature can never really achieve—an uncensored view of life at a particular college, crafted in recognition of the fact that not every college will appeal to every student. But that is the beauty of it. These are all very different schools with many different and wonderful things to offer. Our profiles and rankings aim to help students and parents answer that all-important question—"What is the best college for me?"

One last note: In order to guard against producing a write-up that's off the mark for any particular college, before we publish our Best Colleges books we send our administrative contact at each school a copy of the profile we intend to publish. They then have ample opportunity to respond with corrections, comments and/or outright objections. We take careful measures to review the school's suggestions against the student survey data we collected and make appropriate changes when warranted.

After they have taken the survey, we ask students to review the information we published about their school in the previous year and grade us on its accuracy and validity. Year after year we've gotten high marks: Last year, 83 percent of students said our profile on their school was "extremely" or "very" accurate.

We hope our unique rankings, our advice on college admissions and financial aid, and our richly-detailed school profiles in The Best 376 Colleges will lead you to some exciting prospects of "best fit" schools for you. We wish you good luck in your college applications and we hope that wherever you end up going to college.