Metadata is data about data. The term refers to any data used to aid the identification, description and location of networked electronic resources. The information contained in this section is not about the firm itself, rather about the data supplied by respondents to create the Firm Report.

The Consistency score refers to the degree of agreement between respondents. The score is based on the standard deviation of individual respondent's scores for the firm.

We didn't take statistics in college either, but standard deviation is defined as the square root of the variance. For our purposes, the standard deviation tells us how different the typical respondent's score for a firm is from the mean score for that firm. A large standard deviation suggests that a typical score is far away from the mean. A small standard deviation suggests that scores are clustered closely around the mean.

We take the standard deviation and apply it to our standard scale (1-5) where a high value (5) refers to a low standard deviation meaning the individual respondents scored the firm similarly, and a low score (1) refers to a wide disagreement among respondents. N/A indicates that there are too few responses for this calculation to be meaningful.

What does this mean for you? Well, if you see a firm with a very low consistency score, be aware that some people scored the firm very highly and others very lowly. This could mean that some respondents are bitter former employees and others are disingenuous principals trying to compensate, or it could simply mean that the firm has multiple studios which offer very difference experiences.

This score attempts to quantify the amount of depth and thoughtfulness that respondents put into their Firm Reports. We'd rather not get into the details of all the factors we use to compute this score because several of them are also used to detect fraudulent responses. However one factor in this score is the amount of written comments that respondents include with their report. The idea being that these comments can be more informative and take more thought to compose than simply answering a multiple choice question. On a scale of 1-5, a high score indicates thoughtful responses and a low score indicates responses that may have been a bit more careless.

This score attempts to quantify the confidential information the respondents supplied about their work experience. It combines information about the number of years of experience they have, how long they've been with the firm, how many different firms they've worked at, and others. On a scale of 1-5, a high score indicates that the repondents have more experience both at this firm and in general while a low score indicates respondents who may be just out of school or only recently began working at this firm.

This score quantifies our level of confidence that there have been no fraudulent responses. While we can never be sure that someone isn't being a little bit irrationally exuberant about life at their firm, there are some things we can watch out for. While we'd rather not get into the details, we do, for example, try and figure out if the same person is responding for the firm over and over again. On a scale of 1-5, a high score indicates that we think everything is on the up and up while a low score means we think somebody's trying to play us.