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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Penny Lady®, post: 716228, member: 16948&quot;]I have to disagree with this - TPG&#039;s employees are human beings who grade based on their own opinions, experience, training, etc., and a lot of them are younger than you think and have a lot less experience than many of us here.&nbsp; However, I agree that TPG&#039;s should never apply &quot;grade fixing&quot; simply due to the date or rarity of a coin.&nbsp; A grade should be given as consistently as possible for all years.&nbsp; I also believe there should be &quot;specialists&quot; who grade each series - I think there would be more consistency and accuracy if this occurred.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>As many of you already know, grading has changed, or evolved, over the years and Doug is from the &quot;old school&quot; grading standards, if there are such standards, when grading was more strict, so his opinions on grading, whether you want to call them &quot;better&quot; or &quot;correct&quot; (those terms are also subjective), will be different from any generation that learned to grade in the last decade or so.&nbsp; However, if I had to buy a coin blindly or sight unseen, I would rather buy a raw coin from Doug with his assigned grade <i>any day </i>than buy one in a TPG holder just because the holder said that coin was a certain grade.</p><p><br /></p><p>And I don&#039;t think you can say that the graders at TPG&#039;s are necessarily &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;incorrect&quot; (though I certainly feel that they are somtimes!!!) just because you disagree with the grade they assigned to a coin.&nbsp; Again, it&#039;s just another human being&#039;s opinion - and yes, they work for a company that has to back up their opinion, so you&#039;d think it should be more accurate, and from the world&#039;s embracement and success of certain TPG&#039;s, their opinion is given a lot of weight.&nbsp; But that doesn&#039;t mean we have to agree with it.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Grading is never black and white - that&#039;s why no one has been able to invent computerized grading - there are too many variables that are not black and white but are more based on an individual&#039;s own ideas of what&#039;s attractive, how he/she interprets certain descriptive words and the percentage within those descriptions (80% red = RD designation on copper or only 20% red = BN; or 20% rims remaining = VG, rather than 60% rims = F).&nbsp; How does a grader interpret or scientifically measure the quantity of color or the percentage of wear?&nbsp; (The questions are rhetorical, I&#039;m not asking for answers.)</p><p><br /></p><p>FYI, and for what it&#039;s worth, I&#039;ve been writing an &quot;article&quot; on subjectivity in grading and will post it in a separate thread here soon.&nbsp; But it&#039;s been interesting reading all the thoughts in this thread.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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