History Main / FourPointScale

** ''VideoGame/DanceCentral'' received a 7/10, the highest possible from Joe: to others, this may seem like a weak score, but he reasons the game wasn't only fun, it was built specifically to take advantage of the [[Platform/Xbox360 Kinect]]. Not only did he give it his "Badass Seal of Approval", Joe also placed it at #5 on his "[[TopTenList Top Ten Best Games of 2010]]" over other big titles during that year such as ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' and ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeedHotPursuit]]''.

** ''VideoGame/DanceCentral'' received a 7/10, the highest possible from Joe: to others, this may seem like a weak score, but he reasons the game wasn't only fun, it was built specifically to take advantage of the [[Platform/Xbox360 Kinect]]. Not only did he give it his "Badass Seal of Approval", Joe also placed it at #5 on his "[[TopTenList Top Ten Best Games of 2010]]" over other big titles during that year such as ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' and ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeed Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit]]''.

* {{Website/Newgrounds}} is somewhat of an aversion to this; while the scale is only 0-5, it's an unspoken rule that if it's not up to snuff for the portal, it's a 0, if you just didn't like it or something along those lines you should vote 2, and if you love it vote 5. While 1, 3 and 4 are in there, hardly anyone uses them. Undoubtedly this is partially due to its "Blam"/"Protection" system which, generally, rewards you for relatively high ratings of content others have rated relatively high and low ratings for content others have rated low, in a blind system. The actual reviews, however, can become an extreme example of this, as WebVideo/{{Retsupurae}} has demonstrated in their "Retsufrash" videos - they've witnessed perfect or near-perfect scores handed out to games that the reviewer in question had multiple complaints about (usually with no redeeming qualities mentioned), admitted to not finishing, or, in some particular cases, ''couldn't even get the game to start''. They also witnessed one bizarre inversion, where one game they riffed on got a review that called it "one of the best" of its genre, yet only gave it a half-star.

** In an earlier review on the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXxttqyOGWU&feature=channel_page Gamestation]], a flea-market handheld game system resembling the original UsefulNotes/PlayStation, Dr. Ashen gives the system 7/10, saying that it's the lowest score one can give "before the company pulls their advertising".

** Towards the end of the magazine's run, they held mini reviews for UsefulNotes/VirtualConsole games (old games from eras past and original games) and rated games under "Recommended" (this game is good), "Hmmm..." (your milage will vary), and "Grumble, grumble" (game is bad, don't buy it). This style of scoring seems to have been made to avoid the four point scale.

** ''VideoGame/DanceCentral'' received a 7/10, the highest possible from Joe: to others, this may seem like a weak score, but he reasons the game wasn't only fun, it was built specifically to take advantage of the [[UsefulNotes/Xbox360 Kinect]]. Not only did he give it his "Badass Seal of Approval", Joe also placed it at #5 on his "[[TopTenList Top Ten Best Games of 2010]]" over other big titles during that year such as ''VideoGame/HaloReach'', ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'' and ''[[VideoGame/NeedForSpeed Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit]]''.

* The SAT I has a range from 600 to 2400. Turning in a completely blank test (if it isn't discarded out of hand) will ''not'' result in the lowest possible score - the test taker has to [[http://www.colinfahey.com/sat/sat.html actively answer questions incorrectly]] to get the lowest score. The reason for this is to discourage guessing; if you don't know the correct answer, you leave it blank unless you can narrow it down to the point where you are on average gaining points.

* A very notable exception to the rule is the VNDB (Visual Novel Data Base), which, as the name suggests, is a listing of (Japanese) visual novels on the market. When a user attempts to give a 10/10, the site actually warns them that this score is reserved for absolute perfection that is unlikely to ever be improved upon and as such, should be given only two or three times at most over one's lifetime. As a result, the list only has two entries over 9.00[[note]]''VisualNovel/SteinsGate'' and ''VisualNovel/MuvLuvAlternative''[[/note]] and less than 50 entries over 8.00, out of a database of well over 10,000 titles. Since visual novels have fairly low requirements to function, as opposed to regular video games, their quality is almost entirely based around the story and therefore highly subjective. As such, even a game that scores around 7.00 can still be very enjoyable.

The game journalism industry, like all forms of journalism, thrives on ''access''. Game magazines and websites need to get a steady flow of new games, previews, and promotional materials directly from the publishers in a timely manner, or they're irrelevant. Unfortunately, the game industry does not ''have'' to provide this access, and games review sites and magazines are far more reliant on the companies that produce the games than movie critics are on movie companies; indeed, since most websites are expected to provide their content for free, industry advertising is perhaps their most important source of income. There are tales of editorial mandates or outright bribery, but the whole system is set up so that providing a highly critical review of a company's triple-A title is akin to biting the hand that feeds you. This is especially true of previews, which tend to have an artificially positive tone since if a journalist pans a game the company didn't have to show them in the first place, they're unlikely to be invited back to see any of their other work. As such, you're unlikely to see major titles, even the worst of the worst, get panned ''too'' hard in for-profit publications. This results in [[http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/11/double-dragon-neon-review sites like IGN giving insanely negative reviews]] in order to appear "balanced" by panning smaller titles that don't provide them with large enough kickbacks.

->Unorganized, excessively wordy and kinda too complain-y... I'll give this page 8 out of 10.

-->I was going to give some points to Crysis 2 because it hasn’t crashed and there haven’t been any graphical glitches. But that’s kind of weird. That’s like buying a Prius and saying “Well, [[EveryCarIsAPinto it didn’t explode when I used the turn signal]] and [[TheAllegedCar the airbags didn’t go off in my face when I turned on the radio]], so it’s a good car.” PC gamers just have such low expectations for games, I guess. I need to break that habit of awarding points for simply working properly.

The same basic concept applies to every industry; reviewers tend to place things in the upper half of whatever their reviewing scale happens to be, and for the same reasons. That said, it's generally agreed to be much more prominent in gaming than in industries like film. Review aggregator Metacritic, for instance, explicitly has different categorization between films and games: an 85 average is considered "universal acclaim" for films, and "generally favorable" for games (with 90 being considered "universal acclaim" for game), and a 45 average is considered "mixed or average" for films and "generally negative" for games (with 50 being considered "mixed or average" for games).

An additional reason for this lies in a form of selective bias for reviews: You're more likely to go to the trouble of writing a review for something in the first place if you really liked it and want to tell others about it, or absolutely loathed it and want to ward others away from it. While this obviously doesn't apply quite as much to professional critics, it is a major factor in the overwhelming positivity among user-submitted reviews.

The same basic concept applies to every industry; reviewers tend to place things in the upper half of whatever their reviewing scale happens to be, and for the same reasons. That said, it's generally agreed to be much more prominent in gaming than in industries like film. Review aggregate Metacritic, for instance, explicitly has different categorization between films and games: an 85 average is considered "universal acclaim" for films, and "generally favorable" for games, and a 45 average is considered "mixed or average" for films and "generally negative" for games.

If reviewers get ''too'' negative there's always the risk of fan backlash, because ReviewsAreTheGospel. Contrast SoOkayItsAverage, where being just below this scale is acknowledged to have some quality, if not a lot. See also BrokeTheRatingScale and FMinusMinus. See also DamnedByFaintPraise; when this scale is in effect, scores like 7 or 8 ''become'' faint praise.

!!Examples (by subject):

[[folder:Webcomics]]
* ''Webcomic/PennyArcade'', not surprisingly, [[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/02/13 parodied this.]]
-->"It's a digital nightmare from which I ''cannot'' wake."\\
"So, it's a seven?"\\
"No. I need you to bring me... the ''[[BrokeTheRatingScale forbidden numbers]]''."
** [[http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/06/13 Another example.]]
[[/folder]]

* {{Parodied|Trope}} by ''WebAnimation/RedVsBlue'' in one of their PSA videos, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5aUvk86XiA "Game On"]]. In the segment on game reviews, among other things Grif says that scores of 1-6 are meaningless because no game ever gets them, and that a 9.9 is the same score as 10, except the reviewer doesn't like the developer for some reason.

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* Parodied in the TV show ''WesternAnimation/TheCritic''. Jay is told by his boss that his job is to "rate movies on a scale from good to excellent." Jay himself in an inversion: he [[StrawCritic dislikes everything]] and the best score he ever gave a film was a 7 out of 10.
* In ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', Dr. Wernstrom gives Dr. Farnsworth the lowest rating ever: [[http://theinfosphere.org/A_Big_Piece_of_Garbage A, minus, MINUS]]!
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'':
** In one episode, a journalist who travels around America visiting locations to review visits Springfield. He's repeatedly tricked and abused by the residents and storms off to give Springfield the lowest rating he's given anywhere: 6/10.
** In "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS11E3GuessWhosComingToCriticizeDinner Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?]]", Homer becomes a food critic. At first, being [[BigEater Homer]], he gives everything an excellent review. While his fellow critics eventually convince him to be crueler, he still won't give anything lower than "seven thumbs up".
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Real Life]]

!!Examples in media:

* {{Parodied}} by ''WebAnimation/RedVsBlue'' in one of their PSA videos, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5aUvk86XiA "Game On"]]. In the segment on game reviews, among other things Grif says that scores of 1-6 are meaningless because no game ever gets them, and that a 9.9 is the same score as 10, except the reviewer doesn't like the developer for some reason.

** In another, Homer becomes a food critic. At first, being [[BigEater Homer]], he gives everything an excellent review. While his fellow critics eventually convince him to be crueler, he still won't give anything lower than "seven thumbs up".

** In boxing, judges award the winner of the round 10 points and the loser 9 points. Barring fouls, the only way to get fewer than 9 points is to get knocked down, which is rare and usually indicates that the boxer is about to lose. Scores of 7 or fewer would require the boxer to get knocked down several times in a 3-minute span. In that situation, the referee or the fighter's corner would usually stop the fight before the round ended. Rarely, rules are set in place in which the fight is ''automatically'' stopped if three knockdowns occur in a single round. Thus, in fights that go to decision, the scores are very large, but decided by only a few points. You get 108 points just by managing to not fall down for 12 rounds, and 120 points for winning ''every single round''.

Think of just how hard it is to actually get lower than 60% on an assignment. Even if you hand in complete crap for your essay on the UsefulNotes/PunicWars, it will be hard to get much lower than 60%. For you to get under 60%, you pretty much have to turn in something [[http://imgur.com/gallery/WUKgr that goes beyond "not being good."]] Unless you forget to include the last 3 pages of your essay, and accuse UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte of engineering the Punic Wars to cause the September 11 attacks, all written in another language with ink made from cat urine, [[RefugeInAudacity you probably did enough to avoid a score of less than 60%]]. Game developers that achieve this level of suck quickly go out of business, which in turns explains why games rarely ever get scores below 60%. This also explains why there are few games that get under 75%, as most game developers know that churning out sub-par products isn't good long-term business practice, and those who don't know it quickly learn the lesson.

* Jim Sterling of WebVideo/{{Jimquisition}} uses a 10 point scale for their reviews on their blog, but completely averts the trope by making the scores actually mean something, such as 5 being average, 7 being good, and so on. However, the trope is played straight by the fans of the games they reviewed, which caused Jim a lot of grief; their review of ''VideoGame/NoMansSky'' caused fans of the game to DDOS their web site because they gave the game a 5/10 for having potential, but wasting it on bad game design. Their site was attacked again when they gave ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaBreathOfTheWild'' a 7/10, saying that the weapon durability system and other factors annoyed them greatly, but they still enjoyed the game overall. Jim then made an episode pointing out how absurd people were acting over their 7/10 score and wondered how on earth such a score is considered to be horrible. They would eventually completely abandon the rating system and would go with impression videos of a game they played to show all the bad and good bits.

** MMA also uses the 10-point must system, but has no knockdown rules. Therefore, if you lose the round, you get 9 points. If you're utterly dominated, you'll get 8 points. There's basically no way to get fewer than 8, as a fighter who is performing that poorly would be rescued by the referee. In 2017, changes in the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts made the scoring of 10-8 rounds less strict, allowing 10-8 rounds to be scored when one fighter is defeated soundly, but not completely. The change was made in an effort to combat this trope.

* This became a point of contention during the 2016 NBA Slam Dunk Contest. Judges were liberally giving out high scores to point where as the dunks grew more and more impressive, they felt obligated to give them 10s. This led to it taking multiple rounds because the final two athletes kept on tying.

** * An absolutely notorious example of the trope came with IGN's review of ''VideoGame/HogwartsLegacy''. The text of the review utterly ''excoriated'' the game, citing a poor story, weak gameplay, and various technical issues... but the ''score'' was a '''''nine out of ten'''''. Naturally, IGN was immediately taken to task for giving such a glowing score when their opinion was clearly anything ''but'', which many believed was to avoid angering Warner Brothers.

* Averted by [[http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com The CRPG Addict]] who rates games on a 0 to 100 point scale, but makes it clear that a game can be considered recommended around 35, a score of 50 or above means a very good game, and 100 is practically impossible to attain.

* A particularly interesting example of this trope occurs with brokerages. Brokerages have a quid pro quo relationship with the firms that they're supposed to be rating. Usually there's an informal understanding between the two that, if the brokerage advise their investors to sell a particular firm's assets, that firm will stop providing the brokerage with information or other privileges. So brokerages almost never give firms a "sell" rating. You can see a Four Point Scale in corporate credit ratings where junk bonds and high risks get a B-rating while better investments get A, AA, AAA, etc. In ordinary education system a B is a respectable grade and a C is a clear pass.
** While there are independent rating agencies that are more honest, the big three (S&P, Moody's and Fitch) all receive contributions and payments from the companies they are rating. When the time comes to evaluate a company, the big three are generally the most listened-to voices. The incestuous relationship has been theorized to have greatly contributed to the 2008 Economic Meltdown. The lowest investment-grade (below which anything is "high yield" or "junk") is BBB-, and anything below AAA and above default can have a +/- modifier. Below BBB is BB, then B, then CCC, then CC, and a C rating is generally reserved for companies that are paying on time, but who have breached their collateral requirements and are in imminent danger of defaulting. A D is given if you actually default.
** Related: Jim Cramer of Mad Money (featured in ''Series/ArrestedDevelopment'' and ''Film/IronMan'', as well as being a show) received a lot of flak from Jon Stewart of ''Series/TheDailyShow'' fame when it was revealed that he recommended buys and holds on stocks and companies that were, ''days later'', revealed to be financially and ethically bankrupt. Further investigation revealed that Cramer and some business partners of his were using his show to artificially run up prices of stock that they owned by encouraging buys, then selling the stock, in a bizarre pump & dump scheme that he has never been prosecuted for. This may explain the [[http://online.barrons.com/article/SB118681265755995100.html observed fact]] that you can indeed make money by following Cramer's stock picks-- specifically, by selling them short the day after he touts them as a "buy" on his show.

** The Dutch Cito test at the end of primary school, which partially determines what kind of secondary education a pupil can/will take, has a range of ''500-550''. (The reason for this is to avoid the Cito results being misinterpreted as IQ.) The empty range is ''ten times'' the size of the scored range.
** If you're involved in humanities degrees in the [[UsefulNotes/BritishUnis British university system]], you'll almost never see a mark below 35% or above 75%; forty points used on a hundred-point scale. Language marks tend to be capped at the top end to bring them in-line with humanities, since otherwise it would be quite possible to get 100% on a language test. Your final degree in any subject is awarded on a four-point scale, First/2:1/2:2/Third. The thresholds for those are usually 70/60/50/40% respectively.
*** A similar system is in place for Honours degrees in Australia, with the ranks being First-class, 2A, 2B and 3rd Class (generally referred to as just Honours, rather than "Honours 2A" for example). Thresholds are fuzzy since grades are a combination of coursework and dissertation mark, with the relative importance varying on the field, but usually it's about 85%/75%/65%/50%. It's important to note that getting Honours at all is viewed as remarkable, just the higher ones are deemed exceptional (although if you want to go on for postgraduate work like Masters or [=PhD=], you usually need 2A or higher).
** The SAT I has a range from 600 to 2400. Turning in a completely blank test (if it isn't discarded out of hand) will ''not'' result in the lowest possible score - the test taker has to [[http://www.colinfahey.com/sat/sat.html actively answer questions incorrectly]] to get the lowest score. The reason for this is to discourage guessing; if you don't know the correct answer, you leave it blank unless you can narrow it down to the point where you are on average gaining points.
** In the Italian university system, passing an exam originally required you to get at least a 6/10 from three professors, which nowadays translates to 18/30 from a single professor. However, because of the significantly greater flexibility regarding when students can (re)take their exams, students who fail to get at least an 18 are simply not graded at all and told to retake the exam at a later opportunity (or drop the subject if it is optional). This means the scores from 0 to 17 are never actually formally awarded. (On a secondary level: even within the 18-30 range there is a tendency of some professors to award very high –even perfect– scores almost as a ‘default’ to students who don’t display obvious gaps in their basic knowledge of a subject.)

** The only groups that ever get 4s or 5s are those that are entering the competition for the first time. It may be that most judges consider a 4 to be below whatever they usually see in a music festival.
** Many of these competitions have different "levels" of competition so that smaller schools and/or those without much band funding don't have to compete with programs with lots of support and a larger pool of students from which to draw. 4s and 5s often happen when a school enters themselves in too high of a level.
** The way the rankings are treated is also very similar to how video game ratings are treated. As noted above, a 3 is usually the worst ranking you see. As such, Outside of schools who outperformed expectations, a school band receiving anything other than a 1 doesn't usually react enthusiastically.
* It is difficult to grade on a 100-point scale, as many ratings sites do, so even the best amateur critics tend to have a bimodal or trimodal distribution.

** Wagyu beef from Japan causes RankInflation - it's so good, it has its own grade above Prime. However, note that if you're not eating it in Japan, it's probably not ''actual'' wagyu beef, since the name has no legal protection outside its home country and can be slapped on dog food. If a U.S. restaurant that isn't on [[https://www.businessinsider.com/8-restaurants-that-serve-real-kobe-beef-2016-7 this list]] claims to serve "Kobe beef" (Kobe being the most well-known region where wagyu is from), it's "Prime with some extra spices and twice the price tag".
** Beef grading is also a rough estimate of how much you have to cook the beef before it's considered safe to eat - if the restaurant you go to refuses to cook below well done, it's probably not serving you beef that's within consumer quality.
%%* Anyone watched the Olympics? Try the gymnastics events sometime. Despite being on a 10 point scale, it's ''rare'' for any competitor to get below a ''9.5.'' RankInflation is so bad that critical flaws (such as a gymnast tripping and falling on their face) are worth only about a tenth of a point. Flaws that we viewers can't even distinguish? 1/100th of a point off. Scores generally range from 9.7 to 9.9. This is in large part because Olympic gymnastic point guidelines don't differ significantly from those used at lower levels of competition--and you ''will'' find lower scores there. The issue is that at the Olympics, you have the world's best--Olympians ''don't'' screw up noticeably enough to warrant a lower score.

** Some parents take this even further and react to any grade other than an A as a "bad" grade. In some cases this results in [[MyBelovedSmother helicopter parents]] calling up their children's teachers in a fit when their report cards contain even a couple of Bs, while other parents who have the same perspective on the grading scale but [[EducationMama put the onus on the child]] may treat the same report card as [[TheBGrade a failure on the student's part]].
** College also takes it up a notch. Most scholarships and grants requires a student to have ''at least'' a 3.0 GPA or an 80% average. Goes even further in Graduate School. Most Graduate Programs requires a student to maintain an 80% average at ''minimum.'' They take it one step further by threatening to drop a student if they get even a C in more than one class.
** Some colleges have a ''grade'' prerequisite on top of the class one (e.g., pass Math 150 with a C/60% or better). If you keep failing to meet the grade prerequisite, even though you've technically passed, you can't continue.
** The Soviet/Russian education system ostensibly uses numbers from 1 to 5, but in practice 1 is virtually never used, with 2 being the lowest grade, standing for failure.

** For reference, as of 2023 the clock is set to 11:58:30 (90 seconds to midnight). By comparison, in the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the clock was set to 11:58:00 (120 seconds to midnight). Whether the world is ''actually'' closer to apocalypse in 2023 than in 1960 (when the fingers of the nuclear powers were almost literally hovering over the button) is up for debate. Indeed, the Doomsday Clock has been accused of being inconsistent and agenda-driven, and not resting on any rational or objective basis. Considering since its inaugeration the Doomsday Clock has been, on average, 6 minutes to midnight, if TheWorldIsAlwaysDoomed then the Doomsday Clock doesn't actually tell us anything intelligent about the state of the world; it's just a generally pessimistic billboard saying, "Humanity's screwed."

* Inverted in the HKDSE (the HK equivalent of SAT/ACT/GCE, etc.). The scale, from the worst to the best, is [[BrokeTheRatingScale U]], 1 (fail), 2 (minimum passing grade), 3 (minimum grade required in Chinese Language and English Language for entering univerisity), 4, 5, [[RankInflation 5* and 5**]]. To quote some unofficial statistics collected by exam takers, the cutoff marks for 5** and 3 for Chinese language are merely 67% and 47% respectively. It doesn't help that many students consider the Chinese Language to be the so-called [[ThatOneLevel "subject bringing demise"]]
** It would be more jarring if you know just how much exam takers are awarded for even a decent grade. In 2015, only '''0.8%''' (472 of the 60,114 day-school candidates) got a 5** in Chinese Language, a core subject that everyone must take. Only half (52,7%) of them got a grade of 3 or above. It isn't much better for elective subjects either. The elective subject which students performed the best, physics, has a 5** yield of 2.8% (335 out of the 12,106 candidates), and for the less popular ones like Integrated Science and Physical Education, it isn't uncommon to see a single-digit number of candidates (or even '''0''') getting a 5** and less than three-fourth of candidates obtaining a passing grade among the hunderds of candidates.
** Similarly, the common passing mark in school examinations in Hong Kong is 40%, and the average mark for students is often around 60% to 70%.

* Averted by the ATAR Year 11-12 scoring system used in Victoria, Australia. The ATAR is scored from 0 - 99.95, where the score reflects the percentage of students who performed more poorly than yourself. it is impossible to get 100%, as this is statistically impossible. The score is derived from assignments and tests graded by a teacher, and the grueling Year 12 final exams.\\
Assignments and tests are used primarily to rank students in a classroom from best to worst, while the final exam is used to rank the classroom as a single entity. Therefore if a teacher succumbs to the 4-point scale it gets overridden by the final exams. The exam itself is also protected due to the system squeezing the student performance into the "normal distribution".\\
This can greatly shift a score if it lands in the middle of the cohort, as the 'easy' subjects (normally arts) effectively get penalized, while the 'hard' subjects (advanced mathematics and second languages normally) get great boosts because of the high amount of students who 'fail' the exam. The effect of this shift lessens as you reach exceptional scores, at both ends.\\
This creates a situation where one of the better ways to improve your own score is to improve the score of the worst performing student in the class (unless you are top of the class), and a ranking of 80+ will generally get you into any field you want (unless you didn't meet pre-requisites). It also means that each student year cannot be compared to each other, and exams (particularly the mandatory English subject) can get... creative\\
It should be noted that scores under 35 however are not published, instead they are "ungraded" in order to spare the student some measure of dignity.
* Creator/RogerEbert assigned his movie reviews four-star ratings, but often commented on the limitations of the system, such as in his blog post "[[http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/you-give-out-too-many-stars You Give Out Too Many Stars]]." He notes that his reviews do tend to skew positive, and that he considered 2.5 stars to be a pan. It's important to note that in handing out stars, Ebert considered it most important that the movie was successful at being what it wanted to be--a forgettable but well-executed summer action flick with explosions would probably get a better score in Ebert's book than an ambitious but poorly-executed art film. Ebert also wrote a lengthy series of appreciations of Great Movies, all of which were given four stars. That said, he [[CausticCritic never hesitated to award low marks]] to bad movies, though for one to earn ''zero'' stars, he had to consider it not just bad but somehow immoral. Also, he twice [[BrokeTheRatingScale simply refused to award a star rating]]: once for ''Film/PinkFlamingos'', for its sheer bizarreness, and once for ''Film/TheHumanCentipede'', because it was very successful at being what it wanted to be, but what it wanted to be was abhorrent.
* The Michelin Guide (as well as its successor the Guide Rouge) could be considered a reconstruction of the trope. The whole point is to rate the best of the best, and not even bother with anything less than that - getting reviewed ''at all'' means your hash house is doing pretty good, and getting a positive score is a huge boost. The scale thus goes from no stars to three stars, but one star is "better than anything you have ever cooked", two stars is "you should go to this restaurant for your next vacation", and three stars is "your life may not be truly complete until you've tried this".

** AMD also fell into this, though on a lesser extent. When they had a model number refresh, they added an R# prefix and uses odd numbers up to 9. Except the lowest R# starts at R5.

* The RST[[note]]Readability, Strength, Tone[[/note]] system of signal reporting in ham radio is meant to give the operator on the other end an idea of his signal quality. It's a 3 digit number with the first digit, Readability, ranging from 1 to 5 indicating how well the receiver can understand the signal. The second number, strength, is the only one that's really quantifiable and indicates signal strength on a scale of 1 to 9, and the third number, Tone, also ranges from 1 to 9 and is only relevant when sending Morse code. In practice, Readability will always be a 5, Strength will be a 9 or a 5 depending on how loud you're coming in (or how bad the receiver is at copying Morse), and Tone will always be a 9. These rote responses are so common that most ham radio logging software will auto-fill the signal reports as "599", and may have buttons for "599"and "559"as well.