Rating movies: 5-point scale vs. 10-point scale

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I grade my students on a 1 (basic)-2 (progressing)-3 (mastery) scale and I love it. No more fiddling over whether a piece of writing is a B or a B+.
It might be fun to use codewords instead.

"Sally, you performed poorly on the last quiz so I'm afraid I'll have to give you a Deathstalker. But if you study hard for the next one I think you can bring your average up to a Hellraiser."
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Can anyone honestly say the last movie they watched was a 3.2 and not a 3.3 etc? I don't think movie opinions can be mathematically fine tuned like that. Which is probably why Siskel and Ebert At The Movies tv show gave the films they reviewed either a or a
Actually, they can. You just have to be that picky. Example: there was one tiny thing I really didn't like about American Beauty, but I admit it didn't really affect the WHOLE movie, just its respective scene:

WARNING: spoilers below
The holes and blood spots concerning Kevin Spacey's corpse, the point of the bullet wound's entry and exit and the killer's shirt don't match up at all.


But that didn't really affect anything else bout the movie, so... 99/100. Not gonna knock off a whole half star for that one.

Example 2: There was one moment in Takoma's Krampus nom that cracked me the hell up, but the rest was absolute trash, and that one moment didn't do anything to come into play again. So 1/100.

Since I've seen 2000 movies, I separate them by viewing each rating as a separate "league." And as the chart grew, 9.5/10 or 0.5/10 just wasn't accurate enough. I do this as a exercise in being more analytical.



It might be fun to use codewords instead.

"Sally, you performed poorly on the last quiz so I'm afraid I'll have to give you a Deathstalker. But if you study hard for the next one I think you can bring your average up to a Hellraiser."
I rate this code a solid Virgin Spring.



Victim of The Night
It might be fun to use codewords instead.

"Sally, you performed poorly on the last quiz so I'm afraid I'll have to give you a Deathstalker. But if you study hard for the next one I think you can bring your average up to a Hellraiser."
That's pretty funny, bro.



Example 2: There was one moment in Takoma's Krampus nom that cracked me the hell up, but the rest was absolute trash, and that one moment didn't do anything to come into play again. So 1/100.

How did you determine that a laugh is worth one point? And, in this case, it was a really big laugh. How big does it have to be to qualify? And do chuckles get nothing? What about a bunch of chuckles bundled together?

Or with every movie are you just looking for there to be 100 different things you respond well to, and you count them as you go along.

Or are some things weighted different. Is a scare with two points? A deep philosophical point worth 5?

What I'm getting at is, no matter how analytical you think you are getting towards rating this way, it remains entirely subjective. Hopelessly so.

So not only are our emotional responses to a film deeply personal and sometimes to the point of near inscrutability, but so are the way we score them. It's a fools errand. And the bigger the pallette to rank them on (in this example, out of a hundred), the more open to the silliness of our own biases it becomes.



What I'm getting at is, no matter how analytical you think you are getting towards rating this way, it remains entirely subjective. Hopelessly so.
Of course it remains subjective. The entire rating system will always be that way. You can give a movie a rating while accepting subjectivity as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. This is because the rating system will always be based on the user's comfort as a collective of things one enjoys, things that bother one or the desired level of accuracy when translating said feelings to a number. The only way to be objective is to collect the opinions of all who see any movie into one average score, which is scientifically impossible. Websites attempt it for their user's, and RYM even has a "user weighting" including an algorithm that either strengthens or lowers a user's influence in ratings depending on their site activity level. But to gather the whole world"/'s internet ratings is impossible without lots of user's overlapping when being a part of multiple websites and rating the same movie.



Of course it remains subjective. The entire rating system will always be that way. You can give a movie a rating while accepting subjectivity as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. This is because the rating system will always be based on the user's comfort as a collective of things one enjoys, things that bother one or the desired level of accuracy when translating said feelings to a number. The only way to be objective is to collect the opinions of all who see any movie into one average score, which is scientifically impossible. Websites attempt it for their user's, and RYM even has a "user weighting" including an algorithm that either strengthens or lowers a user's influence in ratings depending on their site activity level. But to gather the whole world"/'s internet ratings is impossible without lots of user's overlapping when being a part of multiple websites and rating the same movie.

Oh, ok. I thought you were claiming you had rating things down to some kind of science and I was just trying to figure how such a thing could be done. Because I literally pull numbers out of a hat for my ratings. Or get my cats to tell me how many meows a film is worth.



The trick is not minding
I don’t find it that difficult to rate a movie, however arbitrary it may seem. And no, I’m not claiming I have it down to an “exact science” (seriously?) and I don’t think anyone else was making that claim either.


As I said before, I grade on a 4 start scale and that grade moves up and down depending on the movie itself. There are many things that go into determining that final grade.



Oh, ok. I thought you were claiming you had rating things down to some kind of science and I was just trying to figure how such a thing could be done. Because I literally pull numbers out of a hat for my ratings. Or get my cats to tell me how many meows a film is worth.
The only exact science in opinion is perfecting perception and the delivery of it therein. Essentially, the practice of detailing opinion to an exact science is essentially the same science as "knowing what you're talking about." Because of this, and the fact that no human being could know everything about any one broad field, the science of opinion is always subject to change when another subjective mindset makes a strong enough point to change the original opinion. This van also happen by learning something new about the technique of film or genre by watching yet another movie. Example: how necessary is character development in a movie like Tetsuo the Iron Man? Is it possible to make a movie that justified the complete lack of it therein,? Can you justifiably use SFX to tell stories? The beautiful thing about film is that there are so many kinds because of opinion and preference.



I like a percentage scale myself in my reviews... but with MoFo having the popcorns, I found a way to incorporate my ratings.

0%

1-10%

11-20%

21-30%

31-40%

41-50%

51-60%

61-70%

71-80%

81-90%

91-100%



10 point for my IMDB ratings,
5 point for my Letterboxd.


I actually like the LB rating better.