I actually agree with this fully. Even with a PSA 1, there’s a chance of an administration error that results in a 10.
Every individual graded label only represents a single outcome from a distribution of possible grades for a given card. If you have a mint card, a much more accurate and consistent way of evaluating the grade is to send it into get graded 10,000 times and calculate the % of times it got a 10.
This would be a better reflection of the “true” grade of the card rather than the result of any one given submission. It would also justify the black label premium for me because now you have significance behind the decimal scores in your grade.
But obviously the 10k resubmisson test is not practical. I just like to use it as a thought experiment and a reminder that grading is more of a statistical procedure than the average collector wants to believe
I agree there is selection bias. I also feel like theres always gonna be a margin of error. It may be difficult to identify where that margin is because we are all probably gonna have a different perception of when a grade doesnt match a card and that also may not line up with PSA’s standards; so theres quite a bit of wiggle room there.
As @pfm said, the only way to get the ‘true’ grade of a card is to resub it thousands of times and eventually, the bulk of the data will cluster around the mean grade. Obviously, no one is going to do that, so im content just bitching about the handful i dont agree with until i get over it/ forget about it
The further away from the mean grade you get, the more unlikely it is and you can also start getting into alpha/ beta levels with type I/II errors but all of that is more complicated than its worth for this. Theoretically, any card can get any grade because of error, but the vast majority of the time (95%), your grade is gonna fall where it should, or at least near where it should, by PSA’s standards.
Heres a neat little picture to show what i mean. I think the normal curve is such an interesting topic in stats, but im far from knowledgeable enough to apply it to this situation in a meaningful way lol.
Technically there is a tiny bit of possibility that a graded card will turn back in time and get regraded a finite amount of times, 2nd law of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics allow for that. Time has come to drive this thread into philosophy
I have bought cards as PSA 6, cracked and resubmitted and they came back as high as 9. I also have done the same to PSA 8 cards which came back as 6. Some of those looked absolutely flawless.
