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I don't understand why letter grades aren't more popular for rating things in the US. "A+" "B" "C-" "F", etc. feel a lot more intuitive than how stars are used

• shitpostbot 2y ago
  [dead]
• NegativeK 2y ago
  We'd still get the same pressure to give an A+ to every interaction unless things were fucked. I used to rate three stars for what "performs as expected" until I realized that it's punishing good products. Switch to A-F would result in the same behavior, except it'd be Uber drivers trying to make a living instead of noxious parents declaring that their kid deserves an A.
• technetist 2y ago
  I think that ultimately you run into the same issue. In US education you are taught that you need to get an A. Anything below a C, gets you on the equivalent of a “Performance Improvement Plan” in corporate world. And B is… well… B. So with that rating engrained, people would probably feel bad about rating their ride-share driver a C when they did what was expected. And it wouldn’t stop companies from pushing for A ratings. Even elsewhere like the food industry where they do have letter ratings, A is the norm with anything lower being an outlier. Perhaps for this to work, it would need a complete systemic shift where C truly is the average and A and F are the outliers. In school C would need to be “did the student do the assignment.” And A would need to be “the student did the assignment, and then some.”
• jsnell 2y ago
  There's nothing intrinsically intuitive about letter grades. It's just that you've been taught those specific arbitrary mappings. Consider for example the "S" as a better grade than "A", originating from Japan but widely applied in gaming.
  • xboxnolifes 2y ago
    Even worse, is S actually good, or does the scale go SSS+, SSS, SS, S, A, B?