Let's walk it like we talk it.

Boopotts

Just read Tom's thread on the rollercoaster ride some of his Goudeys recently took, and of course read the requiste follow-up posts lamenting the utter lack of consistency at PSA, etc. etc. Now I'm not disparaging anyone, since I too am not above taking the occasional jab at the grading room guys, but it did get me to thinking: Most of us wish PSA was more consistent; but can we do any better?

I mean seriously. If ten of us were put in a room with a 10x loupe and a blacklight, and handed a pileful of commons, would the individual grades that we independently assigned each card vary as much as those that the PSA guys give out? Maybe they would-- and maybe they wouldn't. Which is why I propose the following:

Let's get a few guys on board-- maybe 10 or 15-- and we'll start a 'round robin' containing 15 or so commons. Once one guy finished 'grading' them, he privately forwards his 'grades' to someone (probably me, since this is my idea) and mails the cards to the next guy, etc. When everyone has had a chance to look at 'em we'll post everyone's grades, and see if the 'PSA community' is any better collectively than the 'PSA employees'.

Note that this isn't a contest between board members. We're not looking for which one of us does the best job grading the cards, were just looking to see if we're all on the same page. Since we'd probably like to have fairly experienced 'graders' on board, so as to make our results more comparable to the PSA grading room results, I think we should probably limit participation to those members that have submitted at least 500 cards or so to PSA. If anyone's interested in this, PM me or post here. I, of course, will supply the commons-- and to spice things up I'll crack out a few PSA slabs and post what PSA gave these cards at the end of the excercise.

Any takers? I'm thinking that 5 guys would probably be the critical mass, so if I can't get four more guys on board then we'll just let this die on the vine. But if we can get 4 or more I think it would be fun-- and might shed some light on just how much consistency we can realistically expect from PSA.

Let me know,
Guy

WinPitcher

what issue do u propose doing?

Boopotts

WinPitcher-

I propose a whole slew. Maybe some '60 baseball, some '63 baseball, some '71 hockey-- whatever I have lying around in EX to MT condition.

bill7549

Sure, count me in....sounds like fun.

CON40

Guy;

Sounds like a good experiment... my guess is we'll be up to two grades apart! I'm game for it if you want to do it. Can we give qualifiers too? Maybe you can put a couple doctored cards in the batch to see if we can identify them!

Boopotts

LOL!! Doctored cards would be a classic. I'll tell you what-- I will throw in a card that's come back 'no grade, does not meet minimum size' two times.

mojorob

Guy,
If you carry out your little caper here........you should try to grade the cards in roughly
the same amount of time that the PSA graders are asked to do so.
Not take a couple hours or evening to do it.
Just a comment.

Mojorob

WinPitcher

I agree with mojo I would imagine that 3 minutes is alotted per card if that...........id like to participate, while I dont have 500 submissions under my belt i do have 25 years of experience to offer, have been a dealer with a store and have bought and sold more cards then I care to admit here in public.

toppsgun

Here's the obvious problem with the experiment.

It's like the child's game of whispering a secret to the kid next to you, then he does the same and so on and so on. The secret never comes out at the end the same way it started.

With all the handlers viewing the cards without them being slabbed, there's bound to be a dinged corner added to the mix somewhere along the way.

Boo, while I admire your effort to replicate the process, it's flawed. (It is a better idea than Vargha's, but he'd disagree with that.) Perhaps we should just leave this to the professionals and take our punishment along with our gifts.

dbj77

novel idea, but I pay PSA who in turn pays their graders to be professional at this, I don't claim to be a plumber, auto mechanic, etc. and charge appropriately for those services, PSA however claims to be a professional grading company and it disturbs me deeply that such a variance of grades can be had for the same cards by both PSA and SGC.

grilloj39

The agrument that "can we do any better" is silly IMO. First all of we're not professionals---we're not paid to do a job of grading cards. Granted, there's a lot of subjectivity in grading, but much of the subjectivity is removed when graders adhere to the grading standards put forth by their respective company, and have procedures in place to reduce mistakes to a bare minimum.

When the dry cleaners do not dry clean your clothes properly, do you walk away and say, "oh well, I can't do any better." I am not picking on any one grading company here, this applies to all: You pay someone to do a job, you expect it to be done properly.

WinPitcher

I was under the impression that this experiment was in no way to prove that we could do better, only to see what we would grade 5 cards at. And that the cards would be left in top loaders so they couldnt get damaged and that the results would be mailed back to the owner while the cards were mailed on to the next person. ?? did i miss something along the way?

dbj77

no, you got it right, but what some of us are saying, if you do that, it can't be compared with what the graders at PSA are doing. None of us are paid professional grading experts, so this "experiment" is just for fun and can't be used to validate or disprove anything.

GoSoxBoSox

<< <i>None of us are paid professional grading experts, so this "experiment" is just for fun and can't be used to validate or disprove anything. >>




True statement. His intention I think is to test our skills. Not PSA's.

WinPitcher

it would prove to those participating that when they send in a card they feel is ex and 4 others also say its ex then it should get an ex?

CON40

winpitcher is right... we do not want to disparage PSA... this little test will reveal just how vast the differences can be in card grading... if it turns out the way boopotts intends, we'll end up fueling support for the disparity in grading!

dbj77

I agree with you winpitcher, but if you and 4 other people agree a card is ex or mint or whatever, what are we using 3rd party grading for? Down goes frazier makes a great point about that. If we examine our cards under magnification carefully before we decide what we want to submit, then couldn't we do the same thing and just keep the card raw?

Now, of course we all use grading here (I think) but realistically I can see why some people don't use grading. The pro's and cons have all been discussed before. If I had a raw t206 and I wanted to make sure it hadn't been restored/trimmed etc. then I might send it in, but for post-war cards, assuming we know the card's dimmensions then we should be able to measure and grade that card ourselves. In my opinion, 3rd party grading is ideal for sight unseen transactions like Ebay. But even then, I've gotten cards that say PSA 9, yet I have PSA 8 cards that look better under magnification. It's sad, but not all PSA 8's or PSA 9's are created equal.

If you get your card graded for encapsulation reason, i.e. to keep it safe from the elements, natural and human, then why not just use penny sleeves and top loaders? At least in a penny sleeve and card saver my card doesn't move around like it does in a graded card holder.

I have mixed feelings on grading, for some reasons it seems reasonable, but others like goudey collectors situation, it seems absurd. How much money did he waste paying for grading fees everytime he resubmitted it?

GoSoxBoSox

<< <i> How much money did he waste paying for grading fees everytime he resubmitted it? >>



$270. The two I had graded at the PSA booth using the on-site service was $25 a card.

dbj77

Tom,
I'll think you'll agree with me that you paid all that money to get the grades you basically started with. I think it was important that you tested the waters but now I think you just proved that cracking and resubmitting is as much a gamble as crap shooting.

Boopotts

"With all the handlers viewing the cards without them being slabbed, there's bound to be a dinged corner added to the mix somewhere along the way."

Toppsgun-

Too true. I tried to think of a way around this, but there really isn't any. If the grades seem to get collectively lower as the cards get mailed around the US, then we can assume they were dinged a bit (not anyone's fault, just the way it is). My thinking, though, is that everyone will try their best to keep 'em clean, and that they'll be returned to me in essentially the same condition they were in when they left my house.

Boopotts

"PSA however claims to be a professional grading company and it disturbs me deeply that such a variance of grades can be had for the same cards by both PSA and SGC."

Why? Anytime you're dealing with an event in which the outcome cannot be known a priori, you have to allow that the outcome for said event exists only on a continuum of probability. I send in a card, and by my reckoning it's mint. This does NOT mean that the card 'should end up in a nine or better holder'. What it does mean is that the card should end up in a 7 holder a small percentage of the time (when PSA dings a corner and doesn't fess up to it, and yes, for those of you who may be uninitiated this happens more often then PSA would care to admit), an 8 holder a fair percentage of the time, a 9 holder a fair percentage of the the time, and a 10 holder a small percentage of the time. Those of you who are disturbed by PSA supposed 'inconsistency' just aren't getting it. The grading process is subjective, and anytime you send off a card to get slabbed there are a range of possible outcomes. Further, because the ridiculous grading standard puts such an emphasis on minute specks of wear, the range of probabilities is much larger than most people understand.

Toppsgun said as much in a thread on this matter about two weeks ago. Sometimes they come back 7's, sometimes 8's, sometimes 9's. IMO, this is a function of the grading standard, not a function of laziness or inexperience on the part of the graders. It would follow, then, that anyone who doesn't like this phenomenon should quit spending sick money on the high end holders, since by spending said money you are validating and encouraging the continued application of this grading standard.

Boopotts

"The agrument that "can we do any better" is silly IMO. First all of we're not professionals---we're not paid to do a job of grading cards. Granted, there's a lot of subjectivity in grading, but much of the subjectivity is removed when graders adhere to the grading standards put forth by their respective company, and have procedures in place to reduce mistakes to a bare minimum."


With all due respects John, how do you know that much of the subjectivity is removed when graders adhere to the pre-determined standards? I don't think there's any empirical evidence to support this at all. I've seen cards in '8' holders that were graded five years ago that could just have easily found their way into '10' holders, and vice versa. In fact, so far as I know there was never a time in grading era when much of this subjectivity appeared to be removed.

Now, you may think it could be removed, but what's the basis for that assumption? I'm guessing it comes from the fact that you've seen your fair share of high-end sevens, and slider nines, and have come to the conclusion that because YOU would have given both of the blazing sevens and the slider nines a grade of '8', then PSA should be able to do the same. But the problem is that this assessment is based only on your observation. Take any one grader-- and that's the key here, one-- and he'd probably agree with you. But different eyes see different things. Take into consideration the fact that the grading standard puts ridiculous weight on microscopic bits of wear, and the field is ripe for the same card to come back in all manners of holders if it's continually cracked and resubmitted.

I don't think that seven our eight pairs of eyes can consistently assign the same grade to the same card, and I think the reason for that lies with the grading standard. My proposal, which I set forth earlier in this thread, is to send these cards to a bunch of experienced posters and see if it's possible for us, as a collective, to be more consistent than PSA. Yes, the sample size will be small, so the results won't be conclusive. But so what? It will be fun, and will provide a chance for forum members to participate in a collective effort. And it's possible that at the end of the day those who participate will have a better understanding of why the same card can come back in so many different holders if it's continually resubmitted. Obviously you don't have to participate if you don't think this excercise will be any fun, or won't have any merit. But to just dismiss it as 'silly' is intellectually lazy.

purelyPSA

There's a way around this...just do it with 10 or 15 cards at the gathering at the National. I don't know if the National crew would be interested in such an endeavor, but that way you have a dozen PSA wonks all in one place, and no extra shipping would minimize damage. You could each start with a card, then pass it to the next guy, until it rotates the whole way around. Like I said, based on some of the names I've seen signed up for the National, maybe they wouldn't want to waste 10 minutes on an exercise such as this, but I'd have been interested if I were planning on attending the National. Hell, maybe even Joe could give it a whack. Probably not, but stranger things have happened, and it wouldn't hurt to ask...