::A Geek in Korea::

Reviews of things that offer an actual score are meaningless and stupid.

I don’t really like partaking in “10 ten” numerical list memes (most times) because I find ranking things by score and placing a numerical limit on their number subjective and dumb. Yes, ranking every single song by an artist, or every single movie ever made is too time consuming to be worth anyone’s time. However, top ten “best” lists and memes are pointless wastes of time regardless of length most of the time.

At best scores serve as barometers of taste, or shorthand for actually knowing someone in detail. All a score serves is a way of ranking something based on arbitrary criteria that vary from person to person. In aggregate, taking in consideration the subjective tastes of a person, they might serve as a guideline as to what someone might like, but only if you had the exact same tastes.

It’s very rare that people like the same things all the time. Since a score is just a shorthand for someone’s opinion, scoring something only works if you know a someone’s tastes and rubric they use to decide said score. If you know someone’s tastes, you probably don’t need a score in the first place. Ask them what they thought, and they’ll tell you.

The methodology for finding the score is much more important than the score itself, as it tells you what the person making the judgment values. If you know what a person values well enough and agree with them, you don’t need a score at the end of a review to tell you what they thought.

People with expert knowledge can craft a list, explain their choices, and have a reason for liking or disliking something. But slapping a score on the bottom demeans the discourse. If people praise something, or pan it, let their words be enough. Don’t give it a grade, stars, points, thumbs up, or anything else to try to justify their opinion.

I’m really not sure when I had this tectonic shift in thinking, but I do know this revelation has freed up considerable amounts of my time. Today, I had to teach about “The Oscars”. The students wanted to know what movies won the 2006 Oscars. I told them I don’t know, and I don’t care. The number of Oscars something wins isn’t an absolutely seal of quality. There were a few years were I’d sit around rooting for one movie to beat another. What’s the point? As long as I like a film, who gives a damn what anyone else thinks?

There are good movies, and bad movies. Things that do well, things that do poorly. I listen to a few people that I think have good opinions. If they like something, I might go out of my way to try to see it. If they say it’s not worth my time, I’ll take it under advisement. But if I wanted to see something, I wouldn’t let a score, star, or a point system stop me.

I really like the video podcast Play|Digital. The host gives brutally honest commentary about video games, is well informed, and reaches some of the same conclusions I do about certain games. However, at the end of the segment she always sticks a numerical score as a guide to what she thought. I really dislike that, because if I needed a score to tell me what to think after all that she told me, she didn’t do her job in the review.

This is the exact reason I really like the Totally Rad Show. Three guys talk about movies, television, video games, and comics. When they like something, they can tell you why. If they hate it, they tell you that too. They don’t give scores, but they talk about their opinions and justify them. I might agree with one of them about a particular subject, but because they don’t try to “sum up” everything in a score, they can’t just fall back on a rating for a lazy review. They might compare things to each other, but it’s always based on their merits. I can get a feel for what they like and dislike better from this conversation way more than a score.

While I might rail against a scoring system, I spend my work hours grading papers and giving students scores that will rank them in future classes. I try to apply the same rubric to my papers, but my foreign coworker might grade entirely differently. No one consults us to make sure scores are fair either. It’s basically a meaningless number that summarizes my opinion because I don’t have the time to write down a detailed review of every single paper that crosses my desk. This is fine because as a teacher I’m only expected to offer detailed critiques at evaluation periods. Those evaluations are supposed to be backed up by my grades as proof. While I do try to keep grades as way of comparing students against each other, it’s never absolute. Parents want a number, where I’d rather give them an opinion.