Do your ratings skew higher or lower on average?

Mostly higher. I tend to be positive about beer. However , I've noticed that lately I've been skewing lower. Maybe it's coincidence,or, I'm getting more critical.

 

Lower.

The grade inflation struggle is real.

 

266 higher, 11 neutral and 891 lower. although a lot of the beers in the lower category are only a point or two lower, some a lot more

 

Lower and I actually have two where I'm dead on the average. Ha!

 

Higher. Call me an optimist, but if something is par for the course, and falls within the style, it's a 4. If it falls short in some regard, I deduct points in .25 increments according to how far it falls short. Same applies oppositely if it's better than usual. This applies to true crafts, not macros or lagers.

Macro and light beers naturally get a lower score from me, but still higher comparably to the site's average. If something tastes like chemicals and smells like rubber cement, it's going to get 1's and 2's at the most from me.

Example is Bud Light Platinum (my worst rated beer). Smelled like a chemical waste dump and tasted like nail polish and fruit loops. That is not something I want to ever taste again. Still though, it was beer, and I've never given anything a straight 1 or a straight 5.

1.13 I believe was the score.
4.96 was my top score which belongs to New Glarus' Thumbprint Apple. As far as I'm concerned that's as close to perfection as it gets. But there's still room, see. On both sides.

 

I clearly skew lower (roughly 2:1 -rDev:+rDev) on this site, but seem to be on-par with my local peers (checkins on UT, comments at tastings, etc.). It's anecdotal, but it seems the NW tends to skew lower in general. I think a perfectly decent beer is a 3, and each .25 increment needs to be earned and justified.

 

Early on I was happy enough tasting a fresh (and oftentimes new to me) commercially available beer, straight off the shelf!

But -- how low can you go, eh? My reviews became much lower than average rDev per brand as I began rating to-style, about three years into reviewing, here. At about that same time I began to think that there was a tendency to rate too highly (or higher than the median per each stylistic category) on this site, and that users on other sites were perhaps 'more accurate' in their reviewing to-style.

But nowadays --and in the long run-- reviewing is a very subjective (essentially, down to literal personal tastes) exercise, and I the rating system works out here just fine.

 

Mine generally are higher. I feel 9 out of 10 are right around the average or higher.

 

Most of mine are lower. But not that far from the average.

 

I had to look back at my beer summary and noted that about 2/3 are higher and 1/3 lower. I am not sure why this is other than I tend to rate some styles higher because of my preferences. There were a few reviews that were at the far ends of the curves (rDev). It is these reviews that makes me wonder why my review was so different.

 

My average rating is 3.98, average rDev +5.6%. My ratings are higher than average about 75 percent of the time. I may revisit some of my more off-the-wall ratings at some point, but it's interesting to take a look back once in a while.

 

Don't know, don't care. Though I read other peoples reviews, I could not care less about my own.

 

But I agree with the idea of biasing upward due to being a little excited for new beers. The trick is trying to recognize your lack of objectivity in the moment, and try to rate accordingly. I have not mastered this.
But, fully agree with you @beertunes , I try to avoid seeing others' ratings before I rate.

 

I try not to.pay attention to that in reviewing anymore. It's a nice little statistic that's there, but for me I find it unimportant.

 

Much, much higher. I conceive of the 5 point scale as a 100 point grading system (i.e., 4.0 = 80), and therefore I regard anything beneath an 4 as a "C" (i.e., not very good).

 

I tend to be lower then average. Although I feel if people's scores matched what they actually wrote when they reviewed beer reviews wouldn't be see high in the first place. So many people describe a beer and overall say they found it good, but nothing that blew them away and then rate it a 4.6 which is well above outstanding (4).

If you think a beer is average rate it as such. Don't give it a 4.6 because you like the brewery or some other random reason.

 

Logically, this doesn't make sense. It just infers that your rating dev is generally higher.

 

It depends if we're talking about deviation for particular beers, or whether my ratings are on average higher than the next person. For the former, you're correct, the logic doesn't hold. I was talking about my ratings in the aggregate, where they're probably higher than the next person because I didn't start reviewing until i had been into beer for awhile, at which point my purchases were more informed.

 

I usually review beers that I like. My ratings are usually higher than average.
I usually review beers that I like, thus my ratings will be higher than the average.
The second example doesn't compute. That's all I'm saying.