Bama is one of the most popular schools for undergrads atm.
When I was a kid, I had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways, shoveling the path with a spatula. Now, get off of my lawn.
How about the rise of google review type evaluations where a 3 is now considered failure. If you have a job that gets rated, even a 4 is not something an employer will be satisfied with. It’s expected that it be 5’s across the board for everyone even the average experience.
I found the '98 Merus (92 RP) to be one of the best wines of that ‘tough’ vintage. I would not have even tried the wine except for Parker’s score/comments.
What’s even funkier is when this stuff varies across cities. Nyc still seems reasonably tough, although you always need mountains of salt when using these reviews.
But some cities around the world seem massively inflated, with every restaurant getting 4/5 stars from customer reviews, and it does seem to restaurants pushing for people to give 5 stars.
I mean, some sushi restaurant here got selected as a top 100 sushi restaurant in the US by yelp, it’s a fucking joke, it’s nowhere near even the best in the city.
Which restaurant?
I looked it up, I’ve never even heard of it. Look at the food photos from Yelp’s top 100, just awful crap.
Yelp may have validity in rural areas to help you pick out the least awful restaurant.
I love WB so very much.
Scores → grades → sushi in under 70 posts!
Diners 2+1. I ate there before, it was fine, but nothing special, not sure how it got top 100.
Price and volume
It also measures average size of classrooms and the scholarly reputation of faculty. Regardless of whether its criteria are good ones, its intent, or its marketing claim, if you prefer, is to measure quality.
I don’t have statistics about party school admissions pools, but I’m skeptical of your claim, if only because of the experience of my own university climbing out of the brink of financial failure by unilaterally increasing admission standards and raising the standards for getting tenure, as well as anecdotes about the experience of other universities. If you have statistics to the contrary, I’ll be happy to be instructed.
This could be read in many ways. New Yorkers have a much more refined palate, while everyone else everywhere is just a tacky heathen who doesn’t know good taste from bad. Or, New Yorkers are just jerks. Or both.
Not sure I would use the word refined. I do think there’s more experienced eaters than in some other places. I have seen things like Ethiopian restaurants get crazy high patron reviews in German cities, where they clearly have no experience with Ethiopian food.
But many of the people doing customer reviews of restaurants in Nyc are tourists/visitors, not New Yorkers.
There is also the fact that restaurants in Nyc get a ton of reviews compared to some European cities. So they may approach more accuracy with the large numbers. Who knows.
I also wonder if Nyc restauranteurs are too busy/don’t care about begging customers to leave 5-star reviews. I’ve had that happen much more often outside of Nyc.
It is due to what they call ability bias. Schools are judged on how well they provide access to jobs, but when looking at the success of a student after graduating it becomes difficult to disentangle the student’s prior ability and what the school has provided. Today, schools have realized that their admittance policy does much of the work in determining the success of their graduating class. That and the networking support does pretty much everything they need in assuring that their students have some target success rate, so challenging/educating the students becomes far less valuable for the school.
I am not a “wine critic” but I actually rate wines with a 5 star scale with the added + for some ratings. 1 star is something I could recommend, while 2 stars is something I consider good, 3 is already very good level. I still very rarely post about a 1 star wine, because there are so many 2+ star wines to that I would be more excited to talk about.

I love WB so very much.
Scores → grades → sushi in under 70 posts!
But what to serve it with?
Agreed. She is like the grand dame of the wine writers world. I think that most wineries don’t care about her assigning a wine a 16.5 or whatever because she is almost irrelevant in the price/sales market at this point. Her major contribution was always education, not pumping up wines by rating to increase sales. Seems like a sweet lady, so why bother to restrict her from tasting your wine? Won’t hurt sales much if you get a tepid number like 17.25 or whatever…
This. I do the same thing these days. The mental gymnastics of 93 or a 94? Point wine aren’t worth it
As to JR, it’s my impression (and it’s just an impression - I have no data and this could be completely wrong) is that the subset of consumers who assign almost totemic significance to the line between 89 and 90 on the 100 point scale don’t have a correspondingly dramatic spot on the 20 point scale, and as such perhaps there has been less overt or unconscious pressure on those reviewers to shoehorn a greater qualitative range of wines into a smaller portion of the scale than in the past.