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Effective immediately, we will be doing away with numerical scores and moving to a new system comprised of six levels or grades:
The reason for this change is two-fold. First, over the years we have to admit that our ratings have ended up being markedly top-heavy. It is time to try to spread the ratings over a wider range of values and to distinguish between them better. The second reason is that we don't think that the difference between a grade of 4.5 vs. 4.6 is terribly meaningful and we hope that readers aren't running around trying to find one particular brand of charcoal simply because it rated a tenth of a point or two higher than another. We don't feel that we can really produce a score accurate to a tenth of a point and we would encourage our readers to look more at the content of the review and make their decision based on the factors that are important to them.So over time, we will be going back through all the reviews and assigning them an appropriate rating based on our new system. We hope this will provide a more useful and meaningful result for our readers. Note that we will be keeping the numerical scores for our Reader Ratings, and nothing will change in that regard. That said, we take into account many factors in producing our final evaluation. The most obvious are things like ash production, burntime, ease of lighting, size distribution and maximum temperature, all of which we evaluate as a part of reviewing a charcoal. Price is less important, since price varies so much depending on location, shipping and who is selling the charcoal. Also, an evaluation can be bumped up or down somewhat by such things as a company's reputation for customer service and their willingness to assist us in providing our readers with accurate information about their charcoal. But we will re-emphasize that our score is our opinion based on our observations and biases. You the reader should read the entire review and decide for yourself which characteristics of a charcoal are important to you. |