13-15 are different levels of masterpieces, 5 star wonders. 12's are simply your average excellent works. 10's and 11's are competent and 'decent'. 9's 8's and 7's are all mediocre and predictable and generic, but not dreadfully offensive - usually just boring. 6's 5's and 4's are all differing levels of plain awful. Anything lower than a 4 is an atrocious abomination and an effrontery to the Lord of aural elation. (as a note, I've reviewed 1,000+ albums, and only one has gotten a 15, while NONE have gotten lower than a 4 (two 4's so far)

It's all just different slices of the same pie, though. Old grade school ratings are the same as 1-15. A+ to A- is 15 to 13, B+ t B- is 12 to 10, C+ to C- is 9 to 7, D+ to D- is 6 to 4, and F+ to F- is 3 to 1. That's unless you don't use +/- on F, then it's 1-13.

If you add .5 increments to 1-5, it's basically a 1-9, unless you consider the possibility of 0.5 or 0, then it's 1-11, but most only do 1-5. 

It also depends on the weight you place to which numbers. One man's 13/15 may be another man's 4/5, which may be another man's A- which may be another man's 4.5/5 which may be another man's sperm count (in millions).

 

Ditto.

 

5 feels natural, 10 feels awkward.

In general I think the actual rating you give doesn't matter so much when it comes to your review although it is important when it comes to calculating the average rating as obtained by the community as has been pointed out - which I think is what is the really interesting aspect of the scoring system. I don't personally care much whether a particular reviewer gives an album four stars or five - what they actually write about the album tells me far more about the album and their reaction to it than the rating they give. I *do* care if the album, say, has a lot of 5-star reviews and a lot of 1-star reviews but not many 3-stars (which implies an incredibly divisive disc); in general I think the shape of the bar chart of review ratings is even more informative than the averaged score.

Bottom line: I think the rating system is fine as it is; the only problem with it is that people get too hung up on it, fussing over whether a particular album should have four stars or five. And really, that's not so much a problem with the system so much as a problem with people's attitudes to it: when we review we should be reviewing with an eye to conveying what we think about an album, not reviewing with an eye to fitting our thoughts into the scoring system.

Personally I'm a fan of the 1-5 star system, it's simple and each rating has a clear meaning so I never have doubts about where to put an album. If there were half stars, I would probably try to avoid using them.

Overall, it suits us nicely. People are quite capable, as I do often, of saying that an album has been rounded up or down from a .5 rating if the narrative justifies it.

 

Yoiu describe Gnosis2000's scale

 

http://gnosis2000.net/" rel="nofollow - http://gnosis2000.net/

 

I'd be content with halfstars, really!!!

None of these make sense . I have two other suggestions (both are better) to choose from:

 

 

 

 

By the way: how can it be that I cannot vote in this poll, even though I am logged in? Is this a bug, some unconventional authorization issue or is it because this thread is moved?

Agreed.

I think the best way to look at the current rating system is that the stars aren't points on a scale going up to 5, they're broad ranges. So, for example, "four stars" is a broad range covering everything from albums which just about scrape into the definition of four star but only barely right up to those albums which are reaching for a fifth star but just don't *quite* make it.

This is obviously going to vary for everyone (hence why I think the average rating is more meaningful than people's individual ratings - when you average it everyone's different biases end up getting smoothed out), but for me I find that the five-star bucket is a bit narrower than 2, three or four, because only the absolute essential picks get into that club - I might find fine distinctions between different five star albums, but they're small enough to be negligible when looking at the overall scale. And, personally, I consider the 1-star range to be extremely narrow; I basically reserve one-star reviews for albums which go beyond simply being mediocre, uninspiring efforts and end up in the realm of actual full-blown incompetence.

Also, would someone move this to general polls or something? It's not letting me vote.