Star ratings are a type of rating scale using a star symbol or similar typographical mark. It is used by reviewers for ranking things such as films, TV shows, restaurants, and hotels. For example, a system of one to five stars is commonly used in hotel ratings, with five stars being the highest rating. Similar systems have been proposed for electing politicians in the form of score voting and STAR voting.
Historical usage 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.
Murray's Handbooks for Travellers and then the Baedeker Guides (starting in 1844) borrowed this system, using stars instead of exclamation points, first for points of interest and later for hotels. The Michelin restaurant guide introduced a star as a restaurant rating in 1926, which was expanded to a system of one to three stars in 1931.
Media
Books In 1915, Edward O'Brien began editing The Best American Short Stories. This annual compiled O'Brien's personal selection of the previous year's best short stories. O'Brien claimed to read as many as 8,000 stories a year, and his editions contained lengthy tabulations of stories and magazines, ranked on a scale of zero to three stars, representing O'Brien's notion of their "literary permanence." He further listed stories with a ranking of three stars "in a special 'Roll of Honor.'" In this list, O'Brien attached an additional asterisk to those stories that he personally enjoyed. Oliver Herford's essay Say it with Asterisks, quips "Never, I think, were a mob of overworked employees so pitifully huddled together in an ill-ventilated factory as are the Asterisks in this Sweatshop of Twaddle." Literary editor Katrina Kenison dismisses O'Brien's grading systems as "excessive at best, fussy and arbitrary at worst." Book reviewers generally do not use a star-rating system though there are exceptions. The West Coast Review of Books rates books on a scale of one ("poor") to five ("superior") stars. According to editor D. David Dreis, readers love the ratings but publishers don't.
Films 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. Three stars meant 'excellent,' two 'good,' and one star meant 'mediocre.' And no stars at all 'means the picture's right bad,'" wrote Thirer. Carl Bialik speculates that this may have been the first time a film critic used a star-rating system to grade movies. "The one-star review of The Port of Missing Girls launched the star system, which the newspaper promised would be 'a permanent thing.' 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." The highest rating any film earned was five stars. The British film magazine Sight and Sound also rated films on a scale of one to four stars. Some critics use a "half-star" option in between basic star ratings. Leonard Maltin goes one further and gives Naked Gun 33+1⁄3: The Final Insult a 2+1⁄3 star rating. Critics do not agree on what the cutoff is for a recommendation, even when they use the same scale. 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. Film critic Dave Kehr—who also uses a 0–4 star scale—believes "two stars is a borderline recommendation". On a five-star scale, regardless of the bottom rating, 3 stars is often the lowest positive rating, though judging on a purely mathematical basis, 2 1/2 stars would be the dividing line between good and bad on a 0–5 scale. Common Sense Media uses a scale of one to five, where 3 stars are "Just fine; solid" and anything lower is "Disappointing" at best. There is no agreement on what the lowest rating should be. Some critics make "one star" or a "half-star" their lowest rating. Dave Kehr believes that "one star" indicates the film has redeeming facets, and instead uses zero stars as his lowest rating. Examples of rating scales:
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