When I went to school a 69 and below was an F.
Anyways, to people who use the whole schools grading system as why everyone considers such and such a bad game excuse. Like others have mentioned though, their grading systems are completely different. Depends on where you live. Why is it then that anything outside of video games uses a grading scale that a 2/5 isn't horrible, but it's not very good, and movies, books, etc, that is rated 3/5 are good, they're just not your classics. Why is it that just games have this skewed rating scale?
The whole scoring system is skewed. 80% of retail games score 7/10 or higher, 19.9% are 6/10, and another 0.1% are below that. Why even use the 10 scale if it's going to be like that? Why not just a 3/3 scale. 1/3 is bad, 2/3 is good, and 3/3 is a must own.
The reason why using all 1/10-10/10 is best, is because it makes it that much more clear how good a game is compared to another.
If Final Fantasy 1-10 were the only 10 RPGs ever made and there were never any other games in the genre made, then how would you score it? Does it make sense to score all the majority of them as 8-10? In my opinion it doesn't. Each one of those games in each persons opinion are going to be better than the other, so if Final Fantasy 6 is to score a 10 and Final Fantasy 4 isn't as good as Final Fantasy 6, then obviously it has to score a 9 since there are only 10 games. Final Fantasy 1 an 8, Final Fantasy 9 a 7, and so on.
Hopefully my description in the above paragraph makes it clear why I score how I do. I rate all games in a genre against all that I've played, not based on whether it's portable or console, not whether it's NES or Wii U. I also don't rate a game on how much it costs or what the games length is, because it may only be a couple of hours, and if a couple of hours is too expensive for you, just wait several months for the price to drop. Price and length shouldn't have any effect on scoring. The only time length would have an effect on scoring is if the game overstays its welcome.
Scoring is simply a comparison with numbers. The higher the number, the better it is to you compared to others. There are different genres though, so a shooter that scores a 9/10 might not be better than an RPG that scores a 7/10 to the person who rated both.
