Review Scales

Just about everything today gets reviews.  We review entertainment, food, products, and basically everything else.  As people we just seem to have a drive to give a score, a grade, to things, and we are equally drawn to seeking out these scores as quick information.  While I generally dislike scores since they incentivize people to skip reading the actual review and just look at the final score, I can see the value in them on the whole.  If something is just terrible, it can save someone a lot of time to see that 503 out of 509 people who reviewed it gave it a very low score and just continue searching elsewhere.  As a starting point, I don't really have a problem with scores too much.  I do have some issues with review culture, though, where non-professional reviewers, although not exclusively, tend to only utilize the highest and lowest scores available to review things.  That mentality, how it effects people and business, and a lot of other things about reviews in general, are not what I want to talk about right now, however.  What I want to focus on is a flaw many people and outlets have tried to solve in many different ways but none of which, at least to me, really accomplish that goal.  That flaw being what system we actually use to score things.

1-10, five stars, letter grades, even medals like in the Olympics, and more are used by critics to rate things.  The 1-10 scale is what I see most common, where a 1 is the worst score possible and 10 the best, but in a lot of cases they want to get even more granular and use decimals.  That essentially turns the 1-10 into a 1-100 system, since a 7.8 is basically a 78.  The same goes for a star rating system, which if it uses half stars is no different than a 1-10 scale system.  I do admire how different a medal system is from basically everything else I've seen used, mostly because it isn't as telling right away.  I couldn't make a quick translation of what a silver medal would be as a number for example.  You can still get a rough idea of the reviewer's opinion, but are still incentivized to actually read the review to really see what that score means.  The downside is that this system of grading is used almost by no one, and perhaps that it invites more comparisons between things being reviewed than others since we are accustomed to seeing medals used to distinguish performances in the same event rather than two pieces of media that may have nothing in common aside from the medium they were presented in.  To a lesser extent the same is true for letter grading, which could also be translated into a 1-5 or 1-10 number scale depending if it uses pluses and minuses.  So, for simplicity's sake, and because it is the most common anyway, I will be using the 1-10 system as a general example when presenting what I think is a more useful and honest rating scale.  I'm also going to be focusing on professional reviewers and not general people who have no reason not to give perfect or the worst possible score for little to no reason whatsoever.

One of the biggest issues that come with a 1-10 rating system that many people have noticed over the past few years is that it is very rare to see things being given a score in the 1-5 range.  Because this has been going on for so long, people now have such a skewed view of the ratings that a 6 becomes equivalent to what a 3 should be, which defeats the entire purpose of having a 1-10 scale.  My solution, I think, would at least help alleviate this kind of issue.  Rather than have the scale go from 1-10, what if we rated things from -5 to +5.  This makes a more clear divide between feeling positive about a thing, where +1 through +5 scores would be given, 0 as neutral or feeling it has equal faults and positive elements, and -1 through -5 describing things that have more faults than positives.  With this system it would be much harder for scores to creep up like they seem to with the normal 1-10 system.  Also, I think it would be more useful for those who just look at scores to understand how the reviewer actually feels about whatever they're reviewing.  I know I would be able to glean more from a 0 rating in this system than a 5 in the current   Granted, I'm sure the extreme ends of the scale would be underutilized in a similar way they are now, but hopefully would at least expand the range more than what we have now.

Naturally, I don't expect this system to sweep the internet and to suddenly see it being used by all the major review outlets, or even any smaller ones for that matter.  The reason I think this, unfortunately, is just because we're stuck in our ways.  People are used to reviewing things in the way they always have been, and likewise people are used to seeing scores presented in that same way.  I know how important aggregate sites can be for reviewers, places like metacritic for example, but even this system could be easily translated to fit their traditional system with the most minimal effort.  The best I could ever hope for would be a very slow change, but even that I don't really see happening unless there's a huge outcry for an overhaul of the current systems.  Still, if I ever do decide to give things a score on here, that's the system I'll be using.  What about you, fine reader?  Do you like the current review scales?  What do you think of the system I've presented here?  Does one seem better or worse, or do you even have an alternative that trumps both of them?  Feel free to comment if you feel so inclined.