The recent rash of bad grade threads ......

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Rookiemonster

Thanks for the response. So if I were to try to translate this into the card Hobby.
Psa grades a card a pre war card a four but pre war collectors would say well it’s more like a 2.5? How do they determine this ratio.

It's more about expectations and the specifics of the issue. I'm not totally up on large cents, but as with most coins there's a standard that most graders follow. And especially at the lower end, there's a lot of interpreting.


If a card is mostly ok, has typical corner wear, and a small crease, is it VG, or only G. I was always taught that a crease equaled G and no better. The grading companies sometimes give a creased card a VG grade.


With many coins, it's things like How many letters of the word Liberty are still showing on the headband, or something like that. It's different depending on the exact design, and probably differs a bit for years where the coins were usually not struck well leading to ones that lacked some detail when they were new.


One of the long time dealers wrote a column on how the standards had been allowed to slide over the years. Possibly to keep collectors and dealers happy with the grades they got. So a Grade of fine today might have been only VG 10 or more years ago.