Repeated symbols used for a ranking date to Mariana Starke's 1820 guidebook, which used exclamation points to indicate works of art of special value: ...I have endeavored... to furnish Travellers with correct lists of the objects best worth notice...; at the same time marking, with one or more exclamation points (according to their merit), those works which are deemed peculiarly excellent.
This annual compiled O'Brien's personal selection of the previous year's best short stories.
"[6] Literary editor Katrina Kenison dismisses O'Brien's grading systems as "excessive at best, fussy and arbitrary at worst.
[8] In the 31 July 1928 issue of the New York Daily News, the newspaper's film critic Irene Thirer began grading movies on a scale of zero to three stars.
Carl Bialik speculates that this may have been the first time a film critic used a star-rating system to grade movies.
[9] "The one-star review of The Port of Missing Girls launched the star system, which the newspaper promised would be 'a permanent thing.
'[9] According to film scholar Gerald Peary, few newspapers adopted this practice until the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma "started polling critics in the 1950s and boiling their judgment down to a star rating, with a bullet reserved for movies that the magazine didn't like.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert "both consider[ed] a three-star rating to be the cutoff for a "thumbs up" on their scales of zero to four stars.
Common Sense Media uses a scale of one to five, where 3 stars are "Just fine; solid" and anything lower is "Disappointing" at best.
[18] Roger Ebert occasionally gave zero stars to films he deemed "artistically inept and morally repugnant.
Film scholar Robin Wood wondered if Sight and Sound readers accepted "such blackening of their characters.
Since 2010, the British Comedy Guide has collected over 4,300 reviews of around 1,110 different acts, across 83 different publications in the form of a star rating.
[28] Michelin stars are awarded only for the quality of food and wine; the luxury level of the restaurant is rated separately, using a scale of one ("quite comfortable") to five ("luxury in the traditional style") crossed fork and spoon symbols.
Some consider this disadvantageous to smaller hotels whose quality of accommodation could fall into one class but the lack of an item such as an elevator would prevent it from reaching a higher categorization.
who argue that the rating criteria for such systems are overly complex and difficult for laymen to understand.
It has been suggested that the lack of a unified global system for rating hotels may also undermine the usability of such schemes.
The assessment evaluates the safety that is 'built into' the road through its design, in combination with the way traffic is managed on it.
The United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) also uses a star ranking to rank the safety of vehicles in crash tests, including front, side, pole impacts, and rollovers, with 5 stars being the most secure.