[pySSK]

The international Baccalaureate uses a 7 point scale: http://www.isnsz.com/media/images/Assessment_6.width-800.png

I generally like my scales to be logarithmic. At work, I made the following scale to explain difficulty of technical items to non-technical people. It works quite well:

  Effort Scale

  1: Easy peasy
  2: Trivial but time-consuming
  3: Some invention required and non-trivial
  4: Invention required
  5: Lot of invention required 
  and for special occasions:
  6: This is a whole new startup

Yelp and Uber ratings, and other 5-star ratings bother me. There is no generally agreed upon standard. Sometimes people give 5 stars only for exceptional service, however, most of the time, people give 5 stars if they weren't wronged in any way. It's a mess! Also, most people aren't qualified to differentiate between five different levels of service/food. It should either be generally agreed upon logarithmic scale, or it should be a yay-meh-nay scale with no guilt in giving a meh.

[isostatic]

With Uber I considered a 4 to be "nothing wrong", and reserve 5 for "amazing service above and beyond".

However it seems that drivers who have an average of say "4.2", despite being perfectly fine and giving above and beyond service 1 in 5 times, gets kicked off. This means that 5 is acceptable and there's no way to mark above acceptable.

I'm odd, I don't expect every trip I get to be above average. That's clearly not possible.

[vec]

I'm the same way. My instinctive reading of a 5 star system maps it onto a bell curve. So if I received exactly the service I expected, with zero complaints, that's obviously a 3 out of 5. 5 stars means two standard deviations above my expectations. It feels to me like a company that gets nothing but 4 and 5 star reviews should be taking issue with their marketing department for setting expectations way too low.

But in an Uber, giving less than a perfect score can get someone fired. So it's 5 stars unless the driver literally spits on me, and then it might be 5 stars and a complaint. Anything lower than a 5 star rating feels unethical, like stiffing a waiter on a tip.

What I can't figure out is how this is of any use to Uber. They have created a "metric" where a large chunk of their customers regard answering honestly as a social faux pas, at best, so what do they think they're measuring?

[ams6110]

People know this and the"real" Uber rating scale is a ten point scale between 4 and 5. Same with Amazon product reviews. Anything under 4 doesn't get a look.

I think a simple thumbs up/thumbs down would be just as effective.

[dizzystar]

That 4.2 thing really disturbed me. Most people driving for Uber aren't doing it because they want to over their alternative to nothing. I couldn't, in good conscience, give out a rating that puts someone's livelihood at risk.

I only gave out one 3 star, but that was because the driver was very bad, though not taxi-driver bad, which is what I would consider 1-star.