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MathiasZaman comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong
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It seems like we suck at using scales "from one to ten". Video game reviews nearly always give a 7-10 rating. Competitions with scores from judges seem to always give numbers between eight and ten, unless you crash or fall, and get a five or six. If I tell someone my mood is a 5/10, they seem to think I'm having a bad day. That is, we seem to compress things into the last few numbers of the scale. Does anybody know why this happens? Possible explanations that come to mind include:
People are scoring with reference to the high end, where "nothing is wrong", and they do not want to label things as more than two or three points worse than perfect
People are thinking in terms of grades, where 75% is a C. People think most things are not worse than a C grade (or maybe this is just another example of the pattern I'm seeing)
I'm succumbing to confirmation bias and this isn't a real pattern
I don't think it's this. Belgium doesn't use letter-grading and still succumbs to the problem you mentioned in areas outside the classroom.
What do they use instead?
Points out of a maximum. The teacher is supposed to decide in advance how much points a test will be worth (5, 10, 20 and 25 being common options, but I've also had tests where I scored 17,26/27) and then decides how much points a question will be worth. You need to get half of the maximum or more for a passing grade.
That's in high school. In university everything is scored out of a maximum of 20 points.