Grading Has Clouded Our Minds...

[JollyElm]

This may be a bit long-winded, but I fear some people simply don't seem to understand the very basic point here.

- A card graded a PSA 8 OC has all the attributes of an 8 (yes, according to fallible human beings), BUT the centering if far enough off to warrant an explanation, the OC qualifier. In other words, the card is an 8 in all ways (corners, focus, gloss, etc.) save for the centering. Very straightforward and there is nothing to question about the specific grade (opinions of people who disagree with the grade assessment aside). In a word, definitive.

- A straight PSA 6 that is obviously way off-center (as the examples shown in the OP are) doesn't give you straightforward information at all. Is the card truly a 6, with what the grader thinks are the proper attributes of a PSA 6, or is it actually a PSA 8 OC that became a PSA 6 because someone checked a box on the submission form?? You can see the card is terribly OC, so why isn't that accounted for (yes, everyone understands that centering requirements differ the higher the grade goes)?? Shouldn't it be a PSA 6 OC? There is no definitive answer. In a word, baffling.

If you're holding the PSA 8 OC in your hand, you know EXACTLY what you have. If you're holding the PSA 6, you have questions, because it is anything but definitive.

Let's quickly take it in another direction to further illustrate the point. Say you have a card that is a PSA 8, but has a bit of gum residue on the front to merit an ST qualifier. So (I'm not sure if you can specifically do this, but let's say for our purposes here you can) since the 'stain' is very minor, you check "no qualifiers" on the submission form and the card comes back a straight 6. Is that a definitive answer to, "What does this card grade?" Of course not. It's fairy dust. If you crack open the card in the PSA 8 ST slab, gently (and easily) wipe away the gum/wax, and resubmit it, you get the exact same grade MINUS the erstwhile qualifier, a PSA 8. If you wipe away the wax from the same card, but it's in the straight PSA 6 slab, some kind of magical transformation happens and it somehow skyrockets up to a PSA 8!!! Simply put, the original grade wasn't 'truthful.'

[Empty77]

Originally Posted by JollyElm

This may be a bit long-winded, but I fear some people simply don't seem to understand the very basic point here.

- A card graded a PSA 8 OC has all the attributes of an 8 (yes, according to fallible human beings), BUT the centering if far enough off to warrant an explanation, the OC qualifier.

I for one think I understand your basic point, it’s just that your interpretation of their grading process is wrong, which I’ll explain my sense of below, but first want to also point out that I agree with your feeling that more information is better, and having the brief/coded notes of why the experienced person who actually handled a card face to face scored it the way they did is good. (if those aren’t going to be listed on the flip, since as you mentioned it’s sort of a curse, then it would be excellent if they bothered to have a mechanism to key in such qualifier codes to the cert verification system so at least looking the item up online would provide that clarification, but I sense that ship has sailed).

It is not that an 8OC gets the OC added as “an explanation” b/c it’s “far enough off to warrant” some helpful extra information, which is the impression that your wording seems to give.

It gets the OC b/c, as PSA itself states, “the centering of the card falls below the minimum standard for that grade”, ergo, it can’t be that grade since it doesn’t meet even the “minimum standard” to be considered so. It’s not that it would be suitable to say: it’s an 8 but pretty badly off-centered, so let’s mention that for clarity; it’s that it is manifestly not an 8 at all and is something else entirely…

What exactly it is depends on the numbers, and here’s where I can also correct your thoughts from an earlier post about the “2-grade rule of thumb” thing (and others who referred to it in follow-up). The reason that always comes to everyone’s mind is b/c that’s how the registry handles qualified cards for the purpose of the registry calculations---since it can’t know exactly what a qualified card should be graded, it uses the 2 grade demotion as a sort of standard average, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to accept cards like that at all b/c it would be too messy to judge what is what.

But that has absolutely nothing (well, very little, it is an average of course) to do with what a qualified card would grade if it were straight; that would be based solely on the numbers in the case of OC, which at least is somewhat objective, compared to say, corners.

So, for instance, an 8 has to be 70/30 (or better) on front and a 7 has to be 75/25 on front, and a 6, 80/20. So if an 8OC is 75/25, then converted to straight, it would come out a 7, not a 6. It’s only the need of the registry to assign an average that the 2-grade concept has seemed to become a rule-of-thumb.

(I think that knowledge would be particularly valuable to anyone comparing items for the purpose like in your original post, both as a pro and a con, whereby a really good 8OC might actually be a 7, but alternatively, it may also be only a 5 [85/15, or I suppose even lower, depending on how it measured out]---and that, as much as anything, might explain why it went for the lowest price of the bunch…)