Interview with a Former PSA/CGC Exec

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I just stumbled upon a very interesting YouTube interview from BostonCardHunter, in which he interviews a former PSA/CGC Exec who was primarily responsible for onboarding/implementing grading training for new employees. I found it very insightful especially the following two points;

  1. New graders lacking confidence to award PSA 10s (fearful of giving the impression they’re not able to spot card defects)

  2. limited pop control for scarce/ high value cards

Pop control is clearly quite a divisive issue, but it was interesting to hear him speak about the vested interest and external pressure grading companies are exposed to when it comes to ultra high end cards. Link to the video is below, skip to 18:30 if only interested in Pop control discussion, though I do think the whole video is worth a watch.

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Highlights

  • Pop control can happen with high-end cards
  • surface is far and away the most difficult thing to train new graders on. Centering, corners and edges can be trained within a day.
  • 9s are a safe grade, new graders fear giving repeated 10s because a 10 signifies that the grader is unable to find defects in the card. Which they can feel is a self-indictment because their job is to find defects.
  • The operations team trying to get through as many orders as possible is often working against the Quality Control team
  • grade creep sinks in, where entire grading lines consistently begin to drop gem rates over time. To combat this it is neccessary to pull graders off the line to recalibrate, but this doesn’t happen as often as it should because of the need to continue processing orders.
  • AI grading fails to detect surface issues because light and hue are applied statically when screening
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These are so obvious once they are said but had never considered them before.

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Thank you for summarising it so succinctly!

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Intermolesting. I’ve suspected this, which is why I split multiple 10-worthy copies of the same card between separate orders, and tend to send a mixture of conditions per order so the grader feels they’ve been “diverse in their application of grades”. Who knows if it helps but these are ultimately people not robots, and as such susceptible to certain behaviours.

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