In which a mere four star rating indicates a problem.

[pawo]

The science fair was very cool indeed. I hope I didn't judge too harshly - I didn't check off anything higher than "average" on my judging form unless the project actually seemed better than most in the category in question. That's what I was told to do, so it should be OK as long as most of the other judges also followed the directions properly

Comments

[mindways]

That's the difficulty with grades - what they "mean" isn't defined anywhere except by their usage. I've seen some schools publish little "what the grades mean" booklets - but unless nearly the entire faculty adheres to those standards, the reality of what grades are given will outweigh a little pamphlet.

[random rambling]

Both with grades and with ratings - inflation so that 'highest' is the expected norm presents the difficulty that you lose all way to distinguish excellence. There are arenas where this is less damaging than others - on eBay, for instance, while knowing that a seller will go above and beyond the call of duty for me is *nice*, it's nowhere near as vital as knowing that they're not a schmuck who'll stiff me, or someone impossible to contact. Learning (!negative) is more important than (positive).

I think one reason that ratings of '4' on Amazon or EBay or whatnot are viewed as unfortunate may be that companies tend to have a rating composed of mostly 5s, some 1s, and a few statistical anomalies in the middle. A "4.XXXXX" rating can be viewed as a shorthand of "ratio of 5s (OK experiences) to 1s (bad experiences)", in which case that '4' comes across as '1/4 of a 1' to all but those customers who bother to click through to the detailed reviews.

It would be neat to see a site that used a more information-rich system - for instance, instead of an average rating, a small bar-graph indicating proportion of each of the five ratings - but making such a thing unobtrusive, information-dense, reasonably browser-generic, and not excessively bandwidth-consumptive would take a bit of effort.