Quote:
Originally Posted by perezfan
Agree completely. There is far too much variance granted at the lower levels, and only microscopic differences separating grades of 7-8-9-10. How and why did this become the standard? The whole system needs to be re-examined... not only for detecting altered cards, but for a more equitable grading scale.
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Part of it was the need for the TPG's to peg traditional grades (yes, they existed before the TPG's...) to a 10 point scale. Back in the 1980's and earlier, there were named grades from Mint to Poor, starting likely with the advent of hobby magazines in the late 70's and early 80's. Interestingly enough, I will always remember how careful the guides were then to point out that grading was only an opinion, and that collectors frequently disagreed on the "grades". (Funny how that plays today, huh? That's right, it's the same damn argument...) Anyway, the point was that eventually these named grades developed into ranges like VG-EX, EX-MT, etc. to provide a means to give collectors and dealers greater descriptive ability when there was a disagreement. If a card was maybe an EX but a weak EX, had too much corner wear or something, well then call it VG-EX. A card that was obviously not "Mint" for some reason, but better than EX was called EX-MT. All of this worked fine until the TPG's came along and decided that EX-MT was a precise grade / thing, and called it a 6. It was never really meant to be used that way by those in the hobby at the time, but suddenly now we have a pegged grade. This just got worse and worse of course as time went on, with the advent of half-grades, etc. Yes, please resubmit those cards for more money to get the half grade bump! If you think cards are bad, try the coin hobby - where the top grade, "MS" (Mint State") has like 5 different ranges if I'm not mistaken, from 65-70. The coin hobby by the way, is who you can blame all this on with our modern professional card graders. What company did CU and David Hall start before PSA? PCGS and coins in 1986. I digress...
The point of this is that the lower end of the scale being less important then as it is now, got less attention in the ever more ridiculous attempts to further refine grading scales. So by comparison to the upper grades, the Poor to about Good range with many TPG's still has even more subjectivity and room for variation. It's not necessarily fair, no, but grading scales have generally been written to evaluate "technical condition", not eye-appeal alone. If we are going on eye-appeal alone (again, still subjective - one man's beater Mantle card may still be the Mona Lisa in his eyes...) that might be a different story as to how to evaluate cards in the lower end of the technical spectrum.
01-04-2020, 09:01 AM
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