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Posted By: Glenn

What it means, according to PSA, is that the card has been marked (with pencil or pen or whatever) but that if it hadn't been marked it would have received a 3. So basically, in terms of both appearance and dollar value, it isn't a real 3. In practice, cards with a qualifier such as this usually sell for slightly less than a card one grade lower without the qualifier -- as it is widely believed (and probably correct) that if the card was good enough to get the grade of "PSA 2" then they wouldn't have given it the grade of "PSA 3(MK)".

The system is useful mainly for higher condition cards that have one major flaw, e.g., being extremely off-center. If you have a card that is otherwise NM-MT in every way, but only meets the centering standard for a PSA 2, they can give the card a "PSA 8(OC)" rather than being obligated by their published grading criteria to call it a "PSA 2". I have at least one sharp card graded by SGC which only received a 3 simply because of a centering problem; if I crossed it over to PSA it would probably come back as a "PSA 6(OC)".

The PSA qualifier system is, however, applied incorrectly. If they used it as they claim to, there would be such thing as a PSA 10 with a qualifier but not a PSA 1 with a qualifier, but exactly the opposite is true. So if you take a card that's good enough to get a PSA 10 and put a drop of ink on it, leaving it otherwise identical to its previous state, they won't give it a PSA 10(MK), they'll give it a PSA 9(MK) or worse every time. But on the other end, they do sometimes put qualifiers on 1's, so there are cards floating around in the population graded "PSA 1(MK)" indicating that the card would have been in poor condition except that somebody wrote on it, and frankly that's just ridiculous.