That's shady. Normally, there's a bias such that people who are disgruntled are more likely to post a review than people who had a good experience. If you take that bias into account, a 4 star rating is pretty good, 5 stars is excellent, and so on.

But if you flip that bias on its head, 5 stars becomes a mediocre rating. That's ok if you've disclosed what you've done, but out of 165 reviews only one mentions that people are incentivzed to write reviews with free swag.

Disclosure; I graduated from Hack Reactor in October 2013.

The lack of negative reviews may seem strange, but I genuinely believe that everyone who has written about HR does so in a sincere manner (whether it be positive or negative). I can understand how it seems shady, but with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

> with a $17k tuition, a "free" hoodie is not enough to sway a review one way or the other.

That's intuitive but factually incorrect. There's a large body of empirical research that shows that giving away trivial tokens has a significant impact. This is true for everything from charitable donations to sign-ups for services to survey responses. Not to mention ratings for college courses, which are, in the aggregate, more expensive than Hack Reactor.

I'm past the edit window here, but it's also not to the point. The point is that, by incentivizing reviews, you skew the sample of reviewers. Even if we didn't have decades of research showing that giving people toys changes their behavior, it would still change the sample of reviewers and make the rating both meaningless and misleading.

That's a valid point, but they are trying to incentivize behavior to fix the issue OP asks about, so it's probably a good thing overall (it's not a hoodie for 5-star reviews only).

You get the same hoodie for writing a negative review.