This seems like a generational thing but I have never met someone my age or younger that thinks that 3/5 or a 'C' is average.

How people like me give ratings.

5/5 - No problems 4/5 - Minor problems 3/5 - Major problems satisfied 2/5 - Major problems unsatisfied 1/5 - Horrible

How average ratings are interpreted:

4-5: Excellent 3.5-4: Okay <3.5:Terrible

This pretty much mirrors how my grades were given in school.

But how I actually give ratings is 5/5 regardless of problems as long as the service was delivered and 4/5 if not because I have anxiety. I couldn't bare to get a bad rating at my job after a mistake so I don't do it to others.

I must be like you too for 5-point ratings. However on Uber I changed my system to:

"A ride happened." -- 5 stars

"I don't think this driver should be driving anyone anymore." -- 1 star.

I've also reluctantly started giving minor tips in the app depending on whether my own rating is trending down or not, since drivers can and do rate riders lower for not tipping. (They have to rate before they take another ride, but they can retroactively rerate.)

UX pattern-driven tipping pressure is gradually normalizing a "voluntary" (but not really since you are extorted via ratings) layer of non-progressive consumption taxes.

There are now apps and other point-of-sale interfaces which default to 20% for "tips". Nice way to lower labor costs by outsourcing a voluntary fee to your customers, but this mostly destroys the signal/feedback value of the tip and rating.

Do the nudge crowd know they are engaging in semantic pollution, e.g. diluting the value of the data they are spending millions to collect, process and analyze.

> Do the nudge crowd know they are engaging in semantic pollution

Perhaps more importantly, do they care?

> This seems like a generational thing but I have never met someone my age or younger that thinks that 3/5 or a 'C' is average.

I think it's related to school grading systems. anything less than an 'A' means you did something wrong.

I remember when I had my first professional performance review, my manager asked us all to fill out the form ourselves and then discuss the difference between our ratings and his rating of us during the review itself. fresh out of undergrad, I gave myself mostly 5/5s and a couple 4/5s where I thought I needed improvement. I was momentarily shocked when I saw he had given me mostly 3s and a few 4s. he chuckled and explained that the company had very high expectations for software devs and that I wouldn't be getting any 5/5s in my first six months on the job unless I happened to be steve wozniak in the body of a 22 year old.

But isn't school grading the exact opposite? Of course anything less than A means you did something wrong. But the test expects you to do something wrong! Failing to complete some of the tasks correctly is normal, expected and exactly what almost all students end up doing, at least semi-regularly. We are imperfect humans after all, not robots.

It's the same with services like Uber driving. There's always room for improvement, I expect the driver to make some "mistakes". Not the kind of life-threatening mistakes, of course, but more like "he could have been 30 seconds faster if he hadn't driven so sluggish" or "she may have treated my luggage with a little more care". And stuff like that is perfectly acceptable, at least as long as it doesn't all happen in the same ride. But a perfect, 5/5 ride must not contain any aspect at all that could have been improved by the driver in order to justify it's rating, and I haven't seen many of those.

Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

I feel like this standard is very different from my experience with professors that actually expected you to get things wrong and compensated by making tests where there were, say, 130 marks available and you needed to take 93 for an A.

It feels weird to me that a 5/5 is for you means "couldn't be improved" because for me it just means "I got from point A to point B with my body and possessions undamaged."

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

This is a really strange concept to me. So wherever you went to school, most students were always able to get 93% or more points in tests, so they "met expectations"? And there was almost nobody who managed to exceed expectations, so it wasn't necessary to keep some of the grades reserved for these people?

I can give some insight in the situation in Germany, where I live. We don't have grades A-F, but 1-6, with A=1, B=2 and so on. So it's basically the same system, just with numbers. But: there are textual expressions as well for each of the numbers. The one for the grade 4, or 'D', is "ausreichend", which means "sufficient" in German, and in the long explanation it is described as being the grade someone gets if he just managed to meet the expectations. So if you got anything above that grade, it means you were above the expectations, and if you were below, you failed to meet expectations. Typically, tests were designed such that 50% correct answers give the grade 4 and are thus expected from each student. The other 50% should be hard enough to get right so that getting a significant share of them right proves that you managed to exceed the expectations.

I guess this design should encourage students to improve themselves and to push themselves beyond the minimum expectations of teachers. By setting aside the largest part of the rating scale (1-4) to honor greatness and using just the smaller part (4-6) to punish laziness, people should rather be motivated by positive feedback instead of by punishment, which is clearly negative feedback.

> Right, which is why 93%+ is typically considered an 'A' but if you get less than an 'A' it means you failed to meet expectations.

Of all of the very surprising things I've learned in this thread, this is perhaps the most surprising to me.

In my view, getting less than an "A" doesn't mean you failed to meet expectations. Getting less than a "C" means that. Getting an "A" means that you performed at an exceptional level.

But there's clearly a generational shift involved in this that I hadn't noticed before now, and I think it's clearly for the worse. If "A" means "Pass" and everything else means "Fail", then there's no reason to have grades at all. Everything should just be pass/fail.

everyone has different experiences in school of course, but at the two undergrad institutions I attended it was pretty much always the case that aptitude for the subject combined with a reasonable effort (ie, turning in completed homework and some studying for exams) would result in an A for the class. only the kids who totally slacked off or were in the wrong major would get Cs or worse.

I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If my manager wants to give me a lower score, that's not something I'm offended by; though I fully expect them to explain - in detail - all my shortcomings that resulted in their determination. I'll push back on just about all of their examples, even if I actually agree with their assessment.

I want my performance reviews to be as objective as possible. In my opinion, others should feel as though they have to convince me that I'm an imperfect employee, because they do.

Realistically, what does one have to gain by not defending themselves?

> I always give myself perfect scores on any self-review.

If I were the one performing employee evaluations, this would be a big red flag to me (unless you really were exceptional in all areas). It would indicate to me that you lack an awareness of your actual performance, and lacking that is significant. If someone can't reasonably evaluate how they're doing, then they can't reasonably be expected to be able to improve themselves in the areas where improvement is desired.

> fresh out of undergrad, I gave myself mostly 5/5s and a couple 4/5s where I thought I needed improvement.

Wow, I never would have expected that. I would only give myself (or expect) a 5/5 if I was really awesome in that category. On a 1-5 scale, the majority of my self-ratings would probably be 3s, with 2s for areas where I know I'm weak, and 4s for areas where I know I'm strong.

Ratings of 1 and 5 are, to me, reserved for the very end of each extreme. 1 means "nothing could be worse", and 5 means "nothing could be better".

it was certainly an embarrassing moment at the time, but I had gotten perfect scores on all my coding assignments in school, so I expected similar on my first performance review. also, when we did evaluations of our professors at the end of each semester, they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

it's hard to understand what a rating out of five actually means unless someone takes the time to explain it in plain english.

> they would always explain that anything less than a 5/5 was basically fucking them over and we better have a good reason for the rating.

In my view, that is an unconscionable level of unprofessionalism. I'd rate any professor who told me that lower just because they told me that -- and say why.

definitely unprofessional, but every last one of them explained it that way. made me think that they were just victims of an unreasonable system. maybe I was naive.

Also _regional_. Mirroring how my grades were given as school would be >40% - pass, > 80% - exceptional. Example grade boundaries[1]: 71/180, or 39.4% - pass; 88/180, or 48.9% - a strong pass[2]. Top grade is 147/180, or 81.7%.

[1] https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/Support/G...

[2] https://www.aqa.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/policy/gcse-and-a...

> 5/5 - No problems 4/5 - Minor problems 3/5 - Major problems satisfied 2/5 - Major problems unsatisfied 1/5 - Horrible

But that makes it impossible to indicate when something is great.

The problem when it comes to uber/lyft in particular is that as the customer you're never really comparison shopping scores the way you can on amazon, yelp, etc. The audience for the scores is Uber itself, not other customers. So the real question isn't "how was the ride", it's "do I want to fuck with this person's livelihood." If the answer is no, there's no reason not to give 5 stars.

> So the real question isn't "how was the ride", it's "do I want to fuck with this person's livelihood." If the answer is no, there's no reason not to give 5 stars.

If that's the actual game that Uber & Lyft expect people to be playing (as it appears that it is), then screw that. I'm not going to be using the services at all.