Out of Ten

Everyone is familiar with the concept of “out of ten” as in, “what would you give Black Hawk Down out of ten?” but I think a lot of people misuse the rating system, I am going to try and explain it.

It’s basically impossible to give something 10. These ratings should be as persistent as possible. Giving something 10 means it is literally the most perfect thing of that type in the world, where nothing can ever be improved upon. If you don’t know how something could be improved, then you’re probably not the right person to declare it perfect — and if you do know how it could be improved, then the aforementioned item is not 10.

If you wish to give something 10, you should give it 9. That gives you the wiggle room for the inevitable when the something is improved upon.

If you’re giving something 9 when you (think you) mean 10, you might think 8 is as impressive as 9 out of 10. It isn’t. 8 means excellent, but not perfect, nor terribly close to perfect.

Broadly speaking 7 is the most common rating. It is perfectly satisfactory. If 7 had an adjective, it’d be “good” — a safe bet, like a pint of bitter in an English pub.

6 is bad. It isn’t that you hated it — but you’re close — if you gave this article 6 — I’d delete it.

5 is catastrophic. Fortunately however you never declare 5s because to an outsider it sounds like you’re describing the item as perfectly average (since 5 is as good as between 1 and 10) — when in reality its catastrophically bad. If you wanted to say something was average — don’t. Average doesn’t tell you anything. It is either good (7) or bad (6).

I’ve never heard someone give 4.

3 is even worse than catastrophic. Given that this article is simply written text, if you’re giving it 3 you’re probably misunderstanding the rating system.

A great article is 9. A good article is 8. A forgettable but not offensive article? 7. A simply bad article? 6. A terrible article? 5. If an article didn’t support readability, had one of those stupid full page interstitials, was full of typos and the content was bad? 5. To warrant 3 it’d have to do all those things, and personally insult your mother.

I’ve never heard someone give 3, 2 or 1.

Naturally you can — and probably should — go to at least one decimal place, if not two. Black Hawk Down? A 8.79 modern military movie.

My point? the out of ten system isn’t linear. And you can use decimal places. But never give 10.