Do you change your ratings ?

[livelove]

I often struggle with how to accurately score movies. This topic is part of a series dealing with voting-related problems, challenges, phenomenons and paradoxes — all as part of a quest whose end-goal is to correctly reflect my appreciation of movies when rating them:

• • On what basis do you rate films ?
• • The rock/paper/scissors paradox: ranking A>B and B>C but C>A ?
• • Do you change your ratings ?
• • How to deal with our changing taste over time ?
• • How do you rate movies seen long ago ?
• • How do you rate movies you have abandoned halfway through ?
• • How granular are your ratings?
• • Do you rate ridiculously bad movies 0 or >0 ?
• • RULES that help you decide how to vote
• • How do you account for the novelty factor and the chronological order in which you watched your movies ?
• • How do you handle the observer effect ?

Hi everyone.

Do you change your ratings? Ever?

I guess, if someone rewatches a film and likes it more/less than the first time around, he/she will (obviously?) change the voting accordingly. So my question is rather:
Do you change your ratings without rewatching the film?

Example given: Let's say you have scored "film X" 70/100. Some days or weeks later you look at the score and somehow remember it to be worse than the score you have given it. So would you downgrade your vote?

argument in favour of changing one's vote:
Sometimes it takes a while to get a real sense of the feelings one has for a film. Also, sometimes you see that there is not much left of the film (in terms of depth, content and storyline) once the direct emotional impact (suspense, shock, thrill) has worn off. So changing the voter later takes account of how much someone truly liked a film on a long-term basis (not just the first few hours).

argument against changing one's vote:
The human mind always forgets information, and normally this occurs incrementally over time. When someone downgrades a film 4 weeks later (kind of engaging in historical revisionism), this might take place because the person doesn't actively recall some of the stuff that made the film great in his/her eyes in the first place (even if passively remembering those scenes when asked about or reading about them). 4 weeks later you don't have the beautiful music in your ears, you don't see the superb lighting, you don't necessarily feel the film's mood entirely given that much has taken place in your life in the meantime, thereby affecting your current mood at the moment of changing your vote. The problem is that, by definition, one doesn't know, what one forgot. So if you gave the film a score of 70 and 4 weeks later you downgrade your vote to 60 or 65, chances are that you don't actively recall the stuff contributing to the 5 or 10 point difference.

[paulofilmo]

sometimes there's an unexpected enduring affection, or it;ll just stay in mind favourably

sometimes i feel ive misjudged its relative place (not thought carefully how good surrounding films were).

sometimes. yes

[iconogassed]

The problem is that, by definition, one doesn't know, what one forgot. So if you gave the film a score of 70 and 4 weeks later you downgrade your vote to 60 or 65, chances are that you don't actively recall the stuff contributing to the 5 or 10 point difference.

The numbers correspond to nothing. They are completely arbitrary. No method or practice relating to their assignment can be more exact or authentic than another.

[livelove]

The numbers correspond to nothing. They are completely arbitrary.

Shouldn't they either correspond to "how much did I like the film" or "how well was the film made" or a combination of both? (see related discussion "On what basis do you rate films?", if you want to chime in, you are very welcome to use that link please). If the numbers correspond to nothing, then why assign numbers to a film? Why use Criticker at all?

No method or practice relating to their assignment can be more exact or authentic than another.

I never claimed it would be an exact science.
But of course scores can be "more exact" and closer to how much you really like a film.
example given:
Let's take the best film you ever saw. On a scale of 0-100, 100 is certainly "closer" and "more exact" than, say, 5.

PS: I don't see how your posting relates to the part of my posting you quoted.

[Luna6ix]

The numbers correspond to nothing.

I disagree. They correspond to each other. Anyone here who's rated more than 101 films will have inevitably rated two the same score, though it takes far less for that to be more than likely. No matter how you rate, whether it's by pure entertainment, or weighing in filmmaking quality or other technicalities, you have to weigh them against eachother. If you don't, then there truly is no correspondence, and consequently you wouldn't have much or a reason to rate anything at all. If they're truly arbitrary, then this site has no purpose.

Personally, I do edit my scores fairly frequently. With a large number of rankings you can often look through a tier and find discrepancies. I will have often rated two movies the same score when, in hindsight, one should be higher than the other. Over the course of the decade I've been on the sight my tastes have changed, and my scoring tendencies have also changed and I need to do a little reorganizing sometimes to make things right.

I'll also add one more reason to edit a score. Among a number of things I tend to rate based upon is lasting power. Some movies are more memorable than others and that is a quality that affects my score.

[ehk2]

Without rewatching a film, I frequently change my ratings to adjust them to my new thoughts, memories or new information that I read somewhere over internet. They are never too drastic. I only change them up to 10/100 points at maximum (excluding a few ones I reevaluate as I've made an unfair judgement). But usually these relatively small changes occur at around some thresholds in my mind. If I'd given a film 23 and if I raise it to 25, that means I laso have to raise it from 2 to 3 in IMDB, and that's a change for me.

Most of the time I raise points and try not to lower them (because my scale looks already much lower than most of the people). I am trying not to touch the scores I think I gave higher than they deserve because I saw them in my childhood (the nostalgia effect).

[TheDenizen]

Rarely. But sometimes.

[Mentaculus]

On very rare occasions.

If I return to a film and my opinion has reversed (this has happened), I will full on delete my old score and upload a new one, since it's like a new viewing experience. If someone's starred a review, I might tweak the score up or down but the text is locked in stone.

As I change as a person (good Lord, how long have I been on this site?) my thoughts on some films will inevitably change. Increasingly, my scores will improve, not decrease, which is an interesting sidebar.

[CosmicMonkey]

Somewhat often. I have changed a lot as a person since I first joined this site, and my standards and ranking system have slowly changed over time as well. I often go through older films I've seen and re-evaluate if the score still makes sense, or in some cases, if I even have forgotten enough of the film to warrant deleting my score altogether. A majority of the time, the scores don't change, but since I do it so often the actual number of times I change ratings is fairly high. Eventually I'd like to go back through every ranking I've made and make sure they make sense to the person and film-viewer I am now, but that would be a major time commitment.

[livelove]

my solution:
After thinking for some time about the problem, my solution is to keep a spreadsheet, in which I note whenever I watch (and rewatch) a film and the corresponding vote:

date of 1st view --- date of 2nd view --- date of 3rd view --- etc.
original ranking --- date --- reranking#1 --- date ---- reranking#2 --- date --- etc.

advantages:

• • I don't lose the original ranking. So I see the evolution of a film's scores.
• • My probable scores (PSIs) are more reflective of my current taste (not a taste long gone)