[rjcj2017]

I have always thought grading was shady.

There was a guy who used to own an LCS is my area that I was pretty tight with, and he told me that he was talking with one of the grading companies about better grades if he submitted a certain number of cards.

Even if everything is on the up-and-up, it's still subjective ... one guy could say you have a 9.5 and another guy could say you have a 9.

[kerryandbeth]

True! I have also seen Forum Threads on this site about how to break open an encased card to res-submit and hope for a better grade...how can it be better after aging??!

[jack pfiester]

I have always thought grading was shady.

There was a guy who used to own an LCS is my area that I was pretty tight with, and he told me that he was talking with one of the grading companies about better grades if he submitted a certain number of cards.

Even if everything is on the up-and-up, it's still subjective ... one guy could say you have a 9.5 and another guy could say you have a 9.

It's exactly like my industry in real estate. Two different appraisers can come up with values that are $100,000 apart depending on their "professional opinion."

[djohn]

Grading will always have issues until it becomes completely computerized, and even then someone could theoretically cheat the system by manually overriding a grade. What really needs to happen is for more transparency to occur, so that when you look up a grading serial number you can find out not just the card info, but also the exact grader's name, date of grade, detailed specifics about the grade itself and maybe even the submitter's information (could just be a user ID number instead of names for privacy's sake). After all if I saw that a user with a specific ID number had submitted 5,000 cards this month and the ones graded by Grader A all got 10s, while the ones graded by Grader B got a mix of 8s, 9s, and 10s, then I would immediately suspect some kind of inside deal happening between that ID and Grader A. This could be dealt with internally with the company, but since they might not be able to pull back all the graded cards for re-grading, it would be nice for the public to be aware that these cards might have suspect grades.
Also, if they tracked the serial numbers for cards when grading that would help with some of the regrading, as they could track a card to know if it had already been graded previously.

[rjcj2017]

About 4-5 years ago I won a $30 grading credit on here for Member Appreciation Month.

I didn't know what to submit, so I sent in a Kevin Durant Panini Instant card of him in his new Warriors uniform because the card stock was super flimsy and I just wanted to protect it.

Lo and behold it came back a 9.5, which I was excited about, but the lower right corner has an obvious speck of white.

So the "corners" portion of the grade was 9.0, but all the other subs were 9.5 (I think there was one 10 for centering, maybe?) and it came out a 9.5, which is Gem Mint.

But if you're just looking at that card, it's not Gem Mint - you can see the white on the corner.

By the way, I appreciate the prize from Beckett and am not picking on the scoring matrix, just pointing out the inherent oddities in the grading process.