I have always wondered about the ratings. It seems to me that all movies below 6 is trash. Has this always been this way? One would imagine that a 5 star rating would be ok since it is right between 0 (bad) and 10 (great). I guess some kind of inflation in the ratings is going on, but how is such things prevented in these kinds of ratings over time? Is it even possible to prevent?
L'equipe, a French sports newspaper, sticks to the traditional interpretation of the 1-10 scale when rating players' performances. In football (soccer), they rate all players on both teams who played enough minutes, so there's at least 22 ratings per match - 5/10 being average and 10/10 being truly exceptional.
Since the late 80s they have given only a dozen or so perfect 10/10 ratings. Almost half of them was given in the past five years, so I guess inflation creeps up everywhere.
I tend to view 1–10 ratings differently than 1–5. 1–5 is more like (American) letter grades where 3 stars equals a C and is average. On a 1–10 rating, it’s more like percentages so 9–10 is an A, 8–9 a B, 7–8 a C, 6–7 a D and less than 6 an F. I’ve seen elsewhere that at least one aggregator does similar to convert between 1–10 scales and 5-star scales so I think that this is a common unspoken assumption of the relation between the two scales.
