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Shopping for a College? Videos Help Students Narrow Their List : Education: The Klass Report tries to show applicants what a campus tour may omit.

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From Reuters

Selecting the right college can make for an experience of a lifetime. Selecting the wrong one can lead to a very long four years.

A victim of “the wrong college” decided to help ease the way for other students and has produced a new series of videos that looks beyond the classrooms and libraries and shows what the campus tour may omit.

The Klass Report is a series of 41 videos, each one focusing on a college or university by interviewing the students who attend it.

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“I went to Northeastern, and while it was a great school, it wasn’t for me. It was too large, inner city, and I was lost for a couple of years,” said Christopher Klass, producer of the Klass Report.

“I went on a campus tour . . . but when my parents and I came up we got lost for an hour. We had no idea we were on the campus. I never got a sense [beforehand] what the school was like,” he said of the school, which is in Boston.

Thus the Klass Report was born.

His goal was to let the college students speak for themselves, emphasizing the layout of the campus, lifestyle, housing, extracurricular activities and things to do off campus.

Klass said the videos show that going to Stanford University, a campus school in the rolling hills south of San Francisco, is quite different than attending Columbia University, very much a city school and in Manhattan.

The videos, Klass said, are designed to give students an idea of what life is really like.

The video of Stanford University, for example, interviewed several very positive students, one of whom said the university had the same attributes as an Eastern Ivy League college but had “a West Coast laid-back atmosphere.”

Almost every student seemed to ride a bicycle.

At Columbia, students generally liked the school, but admitted to some of the drawbacks of urban living.

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“We try to get as many views from as many people as possible,” Klass said.

The 41 videos focus on colleges with the highest out-of-state and international enrollment and include the University of Vermont, Amherst, Boston University, New York University, University of North Carolina, University of Miami, USC and UC Berkeley.

More videos are planned and Klass said the videos are updated every 18 months.

For a complete list of college videos, call the Klass Report at (800) 699-1330. Each video runs about 25 minutes and costs $20 plus $5.95 shipping and handling.

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Winning Moves Inc., one of the newest companies in the $17-billion toy and game industry, has introduced “Judge ‘n Jury,” an audio game of “trials” and “tribulations.”

Players listen to one of 100 audio “trials,” complete with stereo sound effects and enhanced re-enactments of the crimes, on two 90-minute cassette tapes.

Also included in the game are 52 “tribulation” cards, with 104 legal dilemmas printed on them that put individual players on trial. Most of the trials and tribulations are based on actual cases that took place in U.S. courts. The names of the plaintiffs and defendants have been changed.

A roll of the dice determines whether players listen to a trial or draw a tribulation card. The goal is to decide if a player would be guilty or not guilty and those who guess correctly, win.

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The game comes with a Words of Law chart, which assists players with common legal terms used in trials.

The game is available in selected stores and costs about $29.95. Information: Winning Moves in Danvers, Mass., (508) 777-7464.

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