Rating System
Why Is It so Weird?
For my reviews, I use a unique take on the familiar five-star scale. It has two parts:
Opinion
How much I like or enjoyed something—completely subjective and based solely in my feelings.
Appraisal
How good I think something actually is. This is still subjective, obviously, but I do my best to keep bias and preferences out of this score.
Each of these ranges from 0-5 inclusively with half-steps along the way: a total of 11 scores. Since they're independent, that gives me 121 possible ratings to choose from. But here's the cool part:
The sums of Opinion and Appraisal scores.
The number of occourances of each sum.
Adding the two scores together automatically creates an out-of-ten score, perfectly weighted for balanced reviewing! You might rightly notice that this looks striking similar to graphs showing the sums of two dice rolls. Indeed, it works the exact same way. In some sense, the value of the second chart above shows the "probability" of a given score.
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You can also divide the out-of-ten figure by 2 to get the average of the Opinion and Appraisal scores, which is the same as far as the distribution is concerned, but (for me, at least) it does a better job of contextualizing my overall feelings.