May 21, 2022

I am never quite sure what to do with the five stars commonly used to rate movies, books and music. Where do you start?

★★★★★ is obviously brilliant, best in class, but what does ★☆☆☆☆ mean? Generally is means something that’s rubbish and not worth bothering with rather than ‘starting to get interested in this’. Does no stars simply mean unrated rather than being less than rubbish?

Take the rubbish to brilliant scale at face value, and it means anything average should be ★★★☆☆ but generally we only bother to rate stuff we love or hate and don’t bother just marking things as ‘average’.

Let’s assume the scale goes:

1 - Bad. No-one should enjoy this

2 - Poor

3 - Ok

4 - Good

5 - Outstanding

So maybe the ony way to objectively manage this scale is start at ★★★☆☆ with everything and then adjust the rating up or down depending upon our experiences with the thing we are rating.

Design


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