The Star System: On rating scales, the meaning of the fifth star, and the curse of quantification

I've been thinking about review scales since completing my review of Black Bird. VGMO uses a five-star system and I awarded Black Bird 3.5 stars, to my mind a very good score. But I felt some anxiety making the designation. Would someone––a mega-fan, the composer himself––do a quick mental calculation and translate the stars into numbers, as Metacritic does, arriving at 70 out of 100 possible points? A 70? That's a C-, a grade only Bart Simpson could love. But where is it written that a star is worth 20 points? Not in any rubric I can find.

If it were down to me, I might strip the scale from the site altogether. It's deflating to write 1000 words on a given soundtrack (and for me, a dilettante, those words don't come easily) and then flatten the nuance into a visual shortcut. But it isn't down to me. I'm just a contributor, and an occasional one at that. So I'm stuck with the stars, and so long as that's the case I aim to be a bit stingy, at least in awarding that fifth star.

To me, a fifth star is one that a 4-star album grows into over time, time being the critical ingredient missing from most reviews written to a deadline. How does the music hold up a month, six months, one year later? I'm reminded of the way Roger Ebert approached his reviews. A new release could earn anywhere from one to four stars, including half-star increments (only rarely would a film be awarded no stars; Ebert refused to award even half a star to The Human Centipede writing, “The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine.”) But Ebert had a separate series of movie reviews. Dubbed “Great Movies,” these were films the great critic had revisited, in some cases repeatedly, over many years. Probably those films meant different things to him at the different points in his life that Ebert encountered them, but they never ceased to be great. At some point they became Great Movies—5-star films.

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