Broke the Rating Scale

"I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine."

— Roger Ebert, about The Human Centipede, demonstrating this trope's Logical Extreme

On a Scale from One to Ten, this trope gets a rating of Subversion.

Basically, Off the Scale applied to reviews: the movie/video game/whatever has made such an impact on the reviewer that they are willing to break the usual rules of classification of their medium to rate it. The reviewer may consider the work a Dethroning Moment of Suck, Crowning Moment of Awesome, or even Headscratching Moment of "Huh?".

There are six categories:

Still Within Bounds (but pushing it): This is discussed — which is to say, the reviewer openly admits to being tempted to go outside the established bounds of the rating system, but ultimately they adhere to the rating scale;
- First To Hit The Limit: A subtype of this category refers to a limit (either upper or lower) that may have been alluded to, but never before reached.
Out of Bounds: The score is simply outside the established bounds of the reviewer's usual ratings scale (compare Rank Inflation and F--; note that this may even cause the rating scale to be expanded);
Meaningless Comparison: The score is paired with a nonsensical or unusual unit of measure, though often it's thematically relevant to whatever they're reviewing (note that a rater can use an idiosyncratic unit of measure but not qualify for this category if they make clear the scale they're using);
Meaningless Value: The score is itself a nonsensical value (and quite often a Take That!);
Impossible to Rate: The reviewer admits to having no idea what score to give it (this is essentially a shrug);
Refusal to Rate: And the Logical Extreme, the reviewer simply — and usually explicitly — refuses to assign a rating at all. This can be because the reviewer found the work downright repulsive, decided that rating it would be unfair, thought the work was so personal to the artist that a rating was inappropriate, felt rating the work would distract from its purpose or decided that a rating was otherwise inapplicable. This could be because the work put in so little effort that it would be downright insulting to dignify it with a proper review. Sometimes overlaps with Dancing Bear, when the refusal isn't because the work is so bad, but because rating its quality would be beside the point.

May appear as part of a Critic Breakdown. Compare Readings Are Off the Scale, for when this is done with things other than reviews, or F--. Some forms of rating-breaking can involve Grade System Snark.

Examples by Medium Reviewed:

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Still Within Bounds ("I'd give it a zero, but I can't.")

Anime and Manga

JesuOtaku usually gives out unusual review scores (see below), but when reviewing Master of Martial Hearts, he only gave it "one greasy burger out of four" "because frankly, I don't have a lower score."

Fan Works

The Choices We Make: The Atlas leadership simulation is powered by all the technology it could ever require, yet Jaune manages to outright crash it the first time he uses it with a move no one ever could've expected: dropping Atlas onto Mantle. The act killed so many Grimm at once that the simulation couldn't count it properly and crashed.
snakesonasora
- Present in their famous sporking of the Kingdom Hearts badfic "Naga Eyes". The rating scale (sometimes more a warning scale) is typically 1 to 5 Shadows. For particularly terrible fics, there exists a rare rating of Ansem, which includes everything from 5 Shadows plus extra-high doses of WTF-ery. "Naga Eyes" earned an Ansem, but with this addition attached:
snakesonasora: THE ANSEM IS ONLY A FORMALITY. THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH SHADOWS, BEHEMOTHS, ANSEMS, OR XEMNASES TO PROPERLY ILLUSTRATE THE LEVEL OF HORROR PRESENT IN THIS FIC.
- Their sporking of "If I Was Your Nazi" gained a similar ranking and attachment, albeit more focused on the offensiveness of the fic's premise:
snakesonasora: There will never be enough Ansems in this world to fully convey just how horrible, how offensive this...writing is.
In Total Lady Drama Island, after an experimental food substitute causes every female contestant to undergo various degrees of clothes-destroying Breast Expansion, the show's ratings drop to zero. Not because everybody simultaneously chose to stop watching, but because the incident caused viewership to spike so high that the Nielsen servers literally exploded.

Film

Alex Abad-Santos' Vox review of Pixels is either this, or extremely close to this (it got a zero; it's not clear if that's a part of the usual scale on Vox), basically implying he'd give it an even lower score if possible with this opening:
Pixels is a movie.
This is the nicest thing I can say about it. It is a motion picture in the same way that any space with four walls and a window is considered a bedroom in Manhattan, and in the same way that lampreys are fish. It's not so much a film as it is an all-out assault on the senses, a middle finger to anyone with a brain. It's an open taunt, daring people (and their children) to spend money on a gaping malpractice of creativity.
On the same movie, Moviebob (who didn't give out ratings of this kind at the time, so it's here of necessity) did a review of Pixels that explicitly states:
Pixels is awful on a level that defies even the most negative conventions of review. Not a single joke lands, not a single performance works, the story is lazy, the stakes make no sense, the staging is limp and lifeless, and director Chris Columbus has finally made a movie worse than Nine Months. It demands some kind of new metric below the stars or thumbs number scales, like "how many fingers should the people responsible for this piece of shit be allowed to keep".
Film critic Leonard Maltin gave the movie Tarzan: The Ape Man starring Bo Derek his lowest rating of a BOMB, but claimed it was so bad it nearly convinced him to create a rating in his book lower than that.

Literature

"I might have to modify our grading schedule and give it a Z except that the poor letter Z did nothing to deserve being permanently stuck on a Cassie Edwards novel." —SBSarah from romance novel review site Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, reviewing Savage Moon, which got an "F". Read the rest here.

Live-Action TV

In Hell's Kitchen, Chef Gordon Ramsay is very tempted to give incredibly bad Signature Dishes (especially if they hit one of his Berserk Buttons: canned ingredients) a zero, but he always gives them a one.
In the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Emancipation", a new teacher creates a ranking system for Malcolm's class, forcing the students to compete against each other for the #1 slot. Malcolm at first rebels and ends up in the #12 position, but then he decides to be so good that he breaks the system. His name climbs up the ranks until he's doing so well the teacher is forced to place his name on the wall several spaces above the #1 spot (which would appear to make this an example of "Out of Bounds", but he is still technically #1).
Laura Prudom's review of The Mandalorian's second season finale for IGN stated a desire to break out of the scale:
Can we all agree that this episode is an 11 out of 10? Our scoring system doesn't technically allow it, but I feel confident saying that "The Rescue" is the most momentous episode of The Mandalorian yet.

Other

An old joke has a college student asking his professor why he received an F on an exam, as he thinks he didn't deserve one. The professor replies, "I don't think you did either, but it is the lowest grade I am allowed to give."
Pet-based channel Clint's Reptiles gave the peregrine falcon a 1/5 for Care (as in, how easy it is to take care of one), and noted that he considered giving it a 0. He clarified that his scale actually does include a 0, but the only thing he could think of that would score a 0/5 in that category would be an actual human baby—the fact that a falcon even approaches that level of difficulty is a testament to how troublesome they are to house, feed, and train.
As of 2026, there are two nuclear accidents that were given the highest rating of Level 7 (major accident) on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES): Chernobyl and Fukushima. However, even a cursory glance at the reports shows that Chernobyl was a much worse disaster by several orders of magnitude. It is said that Fukushima is a true Level 7 event, while Chernobyl is only a Level 7 because the scale doesn't go any higher.

Tabletop Games

The famous RPGNet review of F.A.T.A.L. awarded a 1/1 rating (out of five) for "Style/Substance", which the reviewers considered an insult to every other game that had scored so badly to date, but going any lower would require them to get the webmaster to modify some backend code.
In Dungeon Dudes' review of the Sorceror subclasses from the Dungeons & Dragons book Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, not only did the Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul easily qualify for S Tier, but they mentioned being tempted to retroactively downgrade the other subclasses due to how powerful they were.
- And then, when reviewing the Tasha's Cleric subclasses, they actually did end up retroactively downgrading some of the other subclasses thanks to the Peace and (especially) Twilight Domain.

Video Games

During Electronic Gaming Monthly's review of 187 Ride or Die, one reviewer said he awarded it a "4.0" as a game but as a product a "negative f*** you" because it was such a crass and blatant attempt to capitalize on gangsta culture with no appreciation for how to make it into a quality game.
The 1996 PC fighting game Catfight, often counted today as one of the worst games ever made, got a lot of lowest-rating-we've-ever-given reviews. The wittiest came from Next Generation magazine: "Our scoring system won't let us give zeroes, so Atlantean owes us one star."
DanceDanceRevolution's foot rating scales initially (in 1998) went from a low of 1 to a maximum of 8, quickly amended with a 9-footer in 2nd Mix six months later, and then a 10-footer in MAX2 in 2002. Here, the rating scale stood still for quite some time, with a few new songs in every release getting harder and harder despite still being rated as 10-foot songs (compare MAX 300, the first 10, to later 10s like the Fascination and Pluto series). Eventually in 2008, Konami relented and introduced a new ratings scale in Dance Dance Revolution X, with all previous ratings inflated by about 50% and a new top-end of 20-foot for future expansion.
- Similarly with beatmania, the difficulty rating for IIDX topped out at 7. They sort of broke it with 7+ until the 12th style, Happy Sky, which they expanded it out to 12. However, they're pretty much back where they started due to Sequel Escalation.
IGN would give The Day Before, an incredibly horrible zombie survival game, a rare 1/10.
When rating God of War I, the Greek PlayStation 2 Official Magazine commented that they would give it an 11/10, but weren’t allowed to, so instead they settled on a 10/10.
The now-defunct Gaming Intelligence Agency gave The Legend of Dragoon a 1 out of 5, and a relentlessly negative review by Nick Maragos that found basically no redeeming value in it. At one point, the Alt Text on the score graphic said that they would’ve given it a zero if their rating scale allowed it. The mirror of their site at the time of its closing no longer reflects this.
On Something Awful, the review giving Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu the lowest possible rating (–50) ended by saying "I hate that I can’t give this game the score it deserves because the SA rating system won’t let me use scientific notation." It’s not the only time reviewers have expressed a wish to go below –50, with various degrees of seriousness. The absolute worst thing ever reviewed there did get a "minus infinity", but it’s better not to speak of that.
Throughout Roahm Mythril’s Mega Man Perfect Run videos, he strictly adheres to a scale of 1–10 for difficulty rankings, though there are some Robot Masters that test the limits. For example, he says that giving Top Man a score of 1 is being generous, because he wants to be fair by not going any lower. Conversely, Quick Man gets a 10, after which Roahm jokes “Can I give you more?” and temporarily fills the rest of the screen with rating icons and the text “OVER 9000!!”
- His X series successor, Kevvl14, thought that giving Blaze Heatnix from X6 a perfect 10 would almost be an insult to his time. He compromises by giving Heatnix the biggest ten he's ever given.
Nintendo Power editor Chris Slate responded to one reader that he had been tempted to award some games a 10.5 out of 10, but didn’t because that would mess up the scale by making 10.5 the new standard. (At the time, only Resident Evil 4, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption had received a 10.)
GameCentral’s review of Postal III gave it a 0/10, though Roger Hargreaves, the reviewer, begins with wondering whether the game’s self-awareness should push it up to 1/10, or if the fact that the developers clearly knew they were releasing a terrible game should push it into the negatives.
Ceave Gaming said this of the Hammer Bro when rating Super Mario Maker 2 enemies on how integral they are to the game, noting that he didn't give it a 0 because "the official competition rules require me to award each enemy at least one Fuzzy for showing up."
The Polish magazine CD-Action's review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 gave it a 10/10, though one of the only two cons they listed in a summary was "It nearly escaped our rating scale!"

Web Original

The Book of Ratings would never award an F rating to anything, because the author would ask himself, "Is this as bad as Scrappy-Doo?" and decide that at least it wasn't that bad. Tellingly, when the time came to rate Scooby-Doo characters, one of them finally got the vaunted F.
Many, many reviews on websites such as IMDb note that the reviewer gave it a "1" solely because the option to hand out "0" isn't offered.
Rank10YGO:
- Rata had used a three-point scale to grade archetypes in various categories before introducing a five-point scale when grading the Ancient Gears. In the grading process, he admitted that he was tempted to give the archetype a grade of 10 for Power before ultimately settling on giving them a 5.
- In light of the fact that King of the Skull Servants can theoretically reach 23,000 ATK and fairly consistently can be summoned with over 10,000 ATK, Rata discusses giving Skull Servants a 6/5 in power, even drawing an additional point on the scale to drive the point home. However, when he takes into consideration that boosting King to absurd attack values is quite literally the only form of removal the deck has, he scales it back to a very highly qualified 5/5.

Western Animation

Care Bears: Welcome to Care-a-Lot: In the episode "Cheering You Grump", Grumpy Bear shows himself to be a Caustic Critic when it comes to Harmony Bear's music shows, granting her Let's Make Rainbows performance two Grumps Down. When the other Care Bears express shock at his scathing review, he replies that two was the maximum amount of Grumps Down he was allowed to give, admitting he would have given a hundred of them otherwise.
Friendly Neighborhood Librarian operates on a one- to five-star scale, and says that she doesn't officially give out 0 stars on the show, but for Wayside, she wishes she could. Instead, she ended up giving it one star. She also gave Dario Argento's The Phantom of the Opera movie "one star, barely."

First to Hit The Limit ("Yes, there is a Zero.")

Fan Works

Soulmate Survey: A new matchmaking app named "Soulmate Searcher" takes the world of Miraculous Ladybug by storm. Unlike many other dating apps, this one has phenomenal, long-lasting success for pairing up couples. Of course, it’s supposed to be impossible for two people to match each other at higher than 85%. But when Marinette and Adrien sign up, they are matched with one another... at 100%.

Music

Crash Thompson gave One More Light by Linkin Park 0.5/5, suggesting that there was a possible 0 score. In 2019, Doug Walker's parody of Pink Floyd's The Wall was that zero, and the zero was accompanied by a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that ended in Crash dropping his Rock Critic persona because that branding was inspired by Walker.

Video Games

"This game officially received the lowest score in the history of GameSpot: a 1.0. And by lowest, I mean it can't go any lower! We don't hand out zeroes, but maybe we should have for Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing." — Alex Navarro, GameSpot's Top 10 Most Frightfully Bad Games of 2004. The video review instead showed him Refusing to Review (unless looks of dismay, Face Palming, Head Desking, and ultimately leaving his desk in disgust count, in which case his review was not a positive one). Three other games would subsequently receive this abysmal score - Ride to Hell: Retribution, Air Control, and Raven's Cry - but Big Rigs was the first.

Web Video

Pet-based channel Clint's Reptiles:
- He considered the king cobra to be a 0/5 in Handleability, the category determining how much you can physically handle or play with a pet. It shouldn't take much explaining as to why, but the fact that he considered other venomous snakes like the gaboon viper or rattlesnake, or even large predators like the American alligator, to be a 1/5, expresses just how dangerous the cobra is^note. He gave the same score to the black mamba, noting that it was, if anything, worse. The saltwater crocodile managed the same score: it may not be venomous, but if a one-ton armored reptile with the most powerful bite in the world is feeling aggressive, there's not a whole lot you can do about it.
- He has a parody of his videos ranking human children as if they were pets. He gave the human child a 0/5 for Care (as in, how easy it is to take care of one), using the words "this is the most high maintenance pet we've ever covered on this channel".
3 of the hosts of Fiery Discourse ranked the dinosaurs from Future War 3 0/10s in a row for how terrible they look, how they add nothing to the story and that the only good looking footage of them is stolen from another film altogether.

Other

At the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci obtained a perfect score of 10. While this had technically been possible the whole time^note, it was deemed impossible to do at a competition as prestigious as the Olympics^note, so the Olympic scoreboards could only reach up to 9.99. Her score was displayed as an abysmal 1.00. Whoops. And then, just for good measure, she proceeded to do it six more times. She left the entire gymnastics world gaping in awe as she turned the sport upside down and inside out, and then shook it just to see what came out. It's still reeling from the aftershocks.

Out of Bounds ("On a Scale from One to Ten, this one goes up to eleven.")

Anime and Manga

From the Anime News Network preview guides: Jacob Chapman gave a negative five out of five to the first episode of kiss×sis.

Comic Books

Spiderfan.org, which rates Spider-Man comic books on a scale of 1 to 5 webs, gave 1998's The Final Chapter no webs, citing Aunt May being brought Back from the Dead with a truly absurd explanation, and general bad writing. The review concluded by saying the story was a waste of precious paper.

Fan Works

In chapter 42 of Crimson and Noire, Plagg makes a ranking list of people that are part of his wielder Marinette's life, and invoke this trope by saying that anyone with a negative rank should be avoided at all cost. Lila is the lowest rank at -10,000,000 because he recognizes her as a Manipulative Bitch towards Marinette despite his warnings falling on deaf ears.
Popular fanblog Equestria Daily gave Cupcakes a "GRIMDARK AS FUCK" tag, as opposed to usual dark fics which usually only get a "Dark" or a "Grimdark" tag. Similary, the epic-length Fallout: Equestria got the tag Legendary.
Nemesis (BeaconHill): Being a Worm fic, Capes are rated between 1 and 10 depending on the threat they could represent. Nirgali, Taylor's Second Secret Identity gets rated as a Master/Changer 12 - a rating reserved to the Endbringers.
Rage Reviews (a review group on Fimfiction.net) normally grades fanfics on a scale of 0% to 100% Rage, with higher percentages being worse scores. But for stories even worse, inspiring the hatred of multiple reviewers, there's the 120% Rage score. And for stories even worse than that, there's 200% Rage, which can only be awarded with permission from the group's founder. And beyond even that, the group made a "Literally Broke the Scale" score, represented by a .gif that randomly cycles through various four-digit percentages. That one was initially created just as a joke — but they wound up actually awarding it to The Rise of Spike the Dragon.
Rate this (Trust is Hard to Come By): The akuma Gardener has the ability to display numbers over people's heads that measure how much Ladybug trusts them. The numbers are supposed to be on a 100-point scale, so negative numbers shouldn't be possible. However, Hawkmoth and Mayura each individually have -2, while Lila actually has a -51.

Film

The Dread Central review of The 13th Alley: One BILLION knives out of 5 (the reviewer, "The Foywonder", thought it was a So Bad, It's Good masterpiece). Note: "Knives" are a standard unit for this site, which is why this doesn’t fit a Meaningless Comparison.
1000 Misspent Hours and Counting gives stars. It also gives negative stars to So Bad, It's Good movies. Zero stars are reserved for films that fail even that test.
Critically Acclaimed podcast hosts William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold broke their C- to C+ scale to "reward" Cats with a D+, stating that the film was so awful on a wholly different level that it in some way had to be seen to be believed while also being truly awful.
Only one movie, Daltry Calhoun, has ever received a zero from IGN (see below for the third and first things the site considered as “utterly lifeless and dull” as this one).
The DVD & Video Guide by Nick Martin and Marsha Porter substitutes a turkey symbol for movies that would otherwise receive one star.
Roger Ebert:
- He chose to remove the film Shoah from his list of candidates for the top ten films of 1985 (in its place appeared The Color Purple). He felt it deserved higher accolades.
- On the other hand, Ebert occasionally gave zero-star ratings. These differed from his occasional "no-star" ratings in that to earn zero stars, a movie had to offend his moral sensibilities in some way. This is why The Human Centipede II got zero stars (as opposed to the first movie, which got no rating) and why the original version of Death Race got zero stars vs. the remake’s half star even though Ebert had admitted that he considered the former more competently made. Ebert talks more about his no-star rating in his review of Death Wish 2.
Vox rewrote the site's code to give The Emoji Movie half a star.
Freddy Got Fingered received minus 1 star from the Toronto Star. No other movie has been rated so lowly.
Dr. Salt, complaining that From Dusk Till Dawn received an inexplicable four stars in a television magazine, wrote that in his book it would get zero stars ("and that's only assuming I can't give negative stars"), with every other movie given one extra star just to make From Dusk Till Dawn seem worse.
Godmothered has an In-Universe example. Grant's news show is said to get fifth place on a list of news shows, even though there are only four news shows.
The Boston Globe gave The Human Centipede II no stars out of five. As did The Daily Mail.
The book and film reviews in the Czech sci-fi/fantasy magazine Ikarie normally go from one to five stars, with zero stars reserved for “So Bad It’s Horrible” ones. (And yes, half out of five was occasionally used as well.) There was one movie for which the reviewer didn’t feel zero was enough, so it got a 00.
An In-Universe example with Kung Fu Panda 1. Master Shifu tells Po that there's no Level 0 when it comes to kung fu training. After Po majorly fails in the training chamber, Shifu says "There is now a Level 0".
Lou Lumenick, the movie critic for the New York Post, gave the sketch comedy film Movie 43 four stars, calling it “the worst movie I’ve ever seen”.
Leonard Maltin will give films that don’t rate a star and a half a BOMB rating.
In-universe in Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping: Connor4Real's sophomore album, CONNquest, gets a -4.0 score on Pitchfork and a 💩/4 on Rolling Stone. The only "positive" review comes from The Onion.
An "off the scale" option is implicit in the review icons long used by the Sunday edition of the (combined) San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. Instead of stars, each option shows a cartoon figure of a little man in a movie seat. From highest to lowest: little man leaping in the air applauding wildly; little man sitting upright clapping his hands; little man slumped dully in his seat; little man fast asleep ... and, finally, an empty seat.
When SFX magazine did their ratings from A to D-minus, rather than a star system, there was one object (a plastic, life-sized grey embryo in a jar) which they decided was worthy of an E.
- The film Species II got an F on the same scale.
- At the other end, when the star system came about, they gave Chuck Versus The Ring eleven stars out of five.
Christian film website Movieguide gave South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut a content grade of -4 (could be -4 billion).
Spill.com used to have "some ol' bullshit" as its lowest rating. The films of Seltzer and Friedberg motivated them to add an even lower "Fuck you" as its new lowest.
According to blogger Unshaved Mouse, the fact that his daughter begged him to let her watch something else, halfway through the movie, means that Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is a scale-breaking Epic Fail. (Ultimately subverted, however, as he ends up giving the film a final score of 34%.)
Unshaved Mouse: Dreamworks? She's a five year old girl. If you can't sell a five year old girl a cartoon with horses, you have FAILED. You have failed more totally than it should be possible for human beings to fail. You have created a masterpiece of ineptitude. You broke the damn scale.
IGN's DVD review of This Is Spın̈al Tap received 11/10 instead of a real score. (This, of course, is a nod to a joke in the movie itself. Arguably no other rating was possible.)
- IMDb’s user rating for This Is Spın̈al Tap is out of 11. Subverted, though, as the film is currently rated 8.0 out of 11.
Video Hound Golden Movie Retriever will normally give movies a score of one to four bones. For some films that are either hilariously bad or horrendously bad, they will offer a rating of Woof!
Donald Clarke of The Ticket awarded six stars (out of five) to Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon 3D, an English-language remake of the director’s own The White Ribbon. This was a joke: no such movie exists and the review was published on April Fool’s Day.

Literature

Maximum Ride has a house in-universe that rates "on a scale from 1 to 10 — an easy 15".
Impish Idea writers Fair & Finn ended their spork of Nibly the Bear Visits the People Town asking the commenters what rating they would give the book (presumably out of 10). The two responses were both in this category: Swenson gave a rating of -85, whereas Brendan Rizzo went even further, with a rating of negative infinity. Then, crossing over with Refusal to Rate, he said that he couldn't give it a rating at all because it does not qualify as a story, and compared it to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
In Worm, the PRT assigns threat ratings to Parahumans in a 1-10 scale, with 1 indicating "can be handled by normal people" and 10 "Person of Mass Destruction". The Endbringers have one or more threat ratings of 12.

Live-Action TV

13 Reasons Why: New Zealand censors, when classifying the show, had to build a new classification of RP18 (Persons under 18 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian) from scratch, created specifically for the series. The censors deemed the subject matter too important to teens for the show to be given the existing R18 rating, yet the RP16 rating was considered to be too low of a rating and did not cover vulnerable 16 and 17 year olds in a country with the highest teen suicide rate in the OECD.
In the eponymous series, Automan has been programmed to learn from the best person in every discipline, so when he materializes for the first time and he discusses his abilities with his creator, he says literally "In a scale from 1 to 10, think of me as an eleven".
Canada's Worst Driver: After a Season 3 challenge, Shelby ranks his performance.
On a scale of one to ten, this drive was probably a zero.
For a while, back in the David Tennant run, the Doctor Who website contained episode reviews from a family who gave them a "fear factor" from 1 (mildly scary) to 5 (extremely scary), shown by the children of the family holding up scorecards. For both "Blink" and "The Impossible Planet", the children apparently made or found scorecards with sixes on them. On the website the overall scores for these episodes are listed as 5.5 ("Off the Scale") and 6 ("Beyond Fear") respectively.
In-universe on Friends when Joey is preparing to audition the role of a 19 year old. He wears a jersey over a t-shirt, a touque and boxers above his waistline, and says "wack" and "'sup". When he asks Chandler if he's 19, Chandler says "Yes. On a scale from one to ten, ten being the dumbest a person can look, you are definitely 19."
The Zettai ni Oishii segments of Gaki no Tsukai ya Arahende, which feature the cast’s attempts at making a specified dish with unusual ingredients, already has built-in negative values on its ratings scale of –2 to 10. Positive scores are represented by stars, negative scores by skull marks. But on at least one occasion, a dish has been awful enough to get two full skeletons.
Keith D.A. Candido gave the fifth-season finale of Highlander, "Archangel", a 0 out of a 1–10 scale, citing the episode’s introduction of an ancient Zoroastrian demon into the Highlander universe, Richie’s death scene happening as a result of him being handed the Idiot Ball, and a whole bunch of story elements that just don’t make sense.
The Onion AV Club's reviews of Hostages mainly dealt out Ds and Fs, but episode eleven was so horrendous that the rating scale looped itself and Sonia Soraiya gave it an "A".
The House wiki maintains a 1 to 10 "zebra factor" for how improbable the diagnosis of the week is. "Joy to the World" scored a 1 for its diagnosis of eclampsia, noting that it's a fairly common occurrence (about one in every two-thousand live births) which doctors always look for from the first sign of pre-eclampsia (despite the relative rarity of such cases progressing to the full thing, because of the danger posed to the mother on the off chance it does), with the only real complication being that the team didn't know to look because the patient didn't disclose she'd been pregnant and had even given birth - but then notes that the episode would have received an 11 if House hadn't been lying when he told another patient that her own pregnancy was a case of partheogenesis (i.e. a virgin birth) rather than infidelity.
In-universe example in How I Met Your Mother, for the price of a wedding dress. The scale given is "never" to "never ever". The rating is "never ever ever ever ever times infinity." It's later revealed to be $8,000.
In the second episode of iCarly featuring Nevel Papperman, upon seeing Nevel's "nerd cave", Sam says that she used to rank nerds on a scale from 1 to Freddie but that Nevel just broke that scale.
A recurring challenge on Impractical Jokers has one Joker showing someone a dating profile created by the others. The person is then asked to rate the profile on a scale of 1-10, and the profile with the lowest score loses. In "Prince + Charming", Murr's profile was given a rating of negative 10. The other Jokers decided to give him the loss on the spot since the score was so bad.
On Junior MasterChef Australia, a contestant was scored an 11 (on a 10 point scale) by two judges. Clearly they thought that his dish was better than the example dish provided by the professional chef.
In-universe in The Muppet Show — Waldorf and Statler love Diana Ross so much that they freely deal negative ratings on an (implicit) 0-10 rating scale to the other acts. This also has the side effect of riling up the audience - during the episode's "UK Sketch", in which Beaker tries to sing Albert Morris' "Feelings", they boo him so much that Animal has to tell them to be quiet halfway through, and they do some Produce Pelting before Gonzo can perform his stunt, causing him to call it off and get Diana back on the stage.
The show MythBusters, since the second season, has a rating scale of sorts for the myths it tests: "Confirmed" (for a myth which fits the criteria within the original parameters), "Plausible" (for a myth which does not fit the original criteria but has been shown to be possible in realistic circumstances), or "Busted" (for a myth which is not possible anywhere near the original criteria, even if the concept behind it is sound). Quite a few myths have a Meaningless Comparison deviation, such as "Plausible, but ludicrous".
- The myth of being killed by a falling bullet from a gun fired straight up was rated "all of the above", that is, Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed. This was because they determined that firing a bullet perfectly vertically would make it tumble as it fell back down, and not gain enough velocity to be lethal (Busted); but if the gun is aimed just a few degrees from vertical, the bullet won’t tumble and could kill someone when it lands (Plausible), and a doctor showed them X-ray slides of people who were actually killed in this way (Confirmed).
In Square One TV's Music Video "Less Than Zero" Stanley O'Toole manages to get negative scores in diving, dance, and rollerskating competitions. When he competes in the hammerthrow he throws it backwards, netting a -55 feet score.
Worse than nothing is my battle cry!
SF Debris gave the notorious Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold" 0 on a one-to-ten scale, with an added message "May God have mercy on your soul". This opened the floodgates, as it were, and he's since handed out another for Enterprise's "A Night in Sickbay". A few horrible episodes only missed this mark because another is worse, and he tries to preserve the Zero for the absolute worst episodes of each series — the one episode of a series that brings shame to the entire Star Trek franchise by association (the aforementioned "Threshold", "Profit and Lace" for DS9, "Code of Honor" for TNG and "And The Children Shall Lead" for TOS).
- "My Way or Janeway" — After noting how the actions of Voyager's Captain Janeway were about as insane as his cartoonish parody of her in "Unimatrix Zero", Chuck measures how his parody would handle each scene from the episode "Latent Image", then sees how the real Janeway measures up. He gives up within three minutes, after the real Captain's actions are more extreme than her parody's.
- For his non-Star Trek reviews, Chuck does not use a numerical scale, but rather "Must See", "Strongly Recommended", "Recommended", "Fine", "Watchable" and "Avoid". Doctor Who's "The Twin Dilemma" and Stargate SG-1's "Emancipation" were rated simply "The Worst".
The State received a number of alarmingly bad reviews in its first season, including a rating of minus 2 stars from The New York Times. MTV and the crew responded by working the bad reviews into an actual ad for the show.
Matt Fowler gave IGN its third zero in the site’s history to the pilot of Work It.
Musings of an X-Phile is a retro review page devoted to analysing The X-Files. Salome's aim is to analyse all the episodes and both the movies. The episodes get grades like at school, and only the very best episodes have merited A-plus. The X-Files: Fight the Future review has two parts: one based on the storytelling and the plot, while the other is based on Mulder and Scully’s relationship. The latter got A-plus-plus-plus.
In an April Fool's Day episode of X-Play, they decided to "re-review" a game they'd previously given a bad review of, Crisis Core. Said re-review basically amounted to a Straw Fan blatantly overdubbing the original with random praise in place of critiques, topping it off with a 6 out of 5 star score.

Music

Chic's song "26" invokes this:
On a scale of one to ten, my baby's a twenty-six.
The Rap Critic gave "No Love" by Eminem (featuring Lil Wayne) six stars out of five, possibly as much from shock that Eminem was on form after several years of mediocrity and Lil Wayne showed his poetic chops in the same song as much as anything. He has since given a few songs 6 out of 5 when they surpass the potential he thinks they had or otherwise "break the barometer"—among other things, he gave The Marshal Mathers LP 2, as a whole, 5.5 stars.
The Rap Critic rated Lupe Fiasco's song "Bitch Bad" a 6 out of 5, and then explains: "Yeah, I can go over the limits of my own rating system—if I can have a zero, I can have a six!" (This actually wasn't the first song he had given a rating of 6.)
Thrash metal band Flotsam and Jetsam’s debut album Doomsday for the Deceiver got 6 Ks out of a possible 5 from Kerrang! magazine. Kind of a Moment of Awesome for a relatively obscure band^note, considering no other album in the magazine’s history has ever received the honour.
When Gogol Bordello played Roskilde Festival in 2006, one reviewer gave them 7 out of 6 stars, declaring that he’d draw the last star himself.
Music reviewer Mark Prindle awarded Madonna's much-maligned album American Life his first and only ever zero out of ten, with a specially-themed ratings graphic for it to boot, on the basis that aside from being musically awful (to the point that he specifically mentions he rated Metal Machine Music higher than it), Madonna's self-pitying "first world problems"-style lyrics were downright intolerable. Prindle directly says at one point (in very sanitised terms) that you could tell him every racist and homophobic joke going and he'd still find it less offensive than one of the richest and most famous people in the world whining about their problems (particularly in light of The War on Terror, which American Life was made as a response to).
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child, he took a piano exam that was scored from 1 to 5. After he had finished, the examiner marked a 5, thought for a moment, then added three pluses, commenting "That wasn't an examination. That was a concert!"
Anthony Fantano once made a joke review of NOW That's What I Call Music Vol. 69. He wasn't present at all and said absolutely nothing during the review, despite the video's otherwise normal editing (including cuts to an absent Cal Chuchesta). Even so, he gave the compilation a Strong 69, presumably using his normal 10-point scale.
Music and film publication Slant Magazine has given at least two zero-star ratings in its music section: to John Rich's Son of a Preacher Man and to Faith Hill's Fireflies. Both reviews read more as Jonathan Keefe venting his spleen against the artists in question than actually reviewing their product.
The late, great British radio DJ John Peel ranked new songs on his programme on a 5-star system. When he first played "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones—a song which would become his favourite song of all time (lyrics from the song are even on his tombstone)—not only did he play it twice in a row, but he gave it a score of 28 out of 5 Stars.

Professional Wrestling

The star ranking system, thought up by industry insider Jim Cornette and Newsletter writer Weasel Dooley, popularized by The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, is mostly defined by three marks. 0 is DUD, 2 is average, 5 cannot be improved upon. The system originally was a joke by Cornette, who compared Weasel Dooley's in depth analysis of matches to decide whether they were "good" or "bad" to TV Guide's deconstruction of movies, which it grades on four stars, because there can be no perfect movies. Jim and Weasel, while believing there can be no perfect matches either, agreed Jerry Lawler and Terry Funk put on one so good in 1981 that four simply wasn't enough, redefining the scale.
- Dooley took it a step further by giving negative star ratings, most famously rating a match between Plowboy Frazier, and Chief Thunder Cloud “negative as many stars as there are in the Andromeda galaxy".
The Wrestling Observer Newsletter became famous for these simply because few reviewed matches ever get more than 3 or less than 1 from the publication, at least when the difficult to impress Dave Meltzer is the one reviewing...that was until 1984 in Madison Square Garden when David Schultz defeated Rocky Johnson^noteas in Dwayne's father in a match Meltzer gave "minus 3 stars". This was surpassed at the 1985 The Wrestling Classic after Meltzer rated a match between Junkyard Dog and Moondog Spot "minus 5 stars", which presumably means cannot get any worse.^note
On the positive end, Meltzer first broke the rating scale in 1994, rating a match between Mitsuharu Misawa and Toshiaki Kawada, as a sign he believed it to be the greatest match of all time. Of all time it was not, however, as the Wrestle Kingdom 11 main event between Kenny Omega and then-reigning IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kazuchika Okada on January 4, 2017 also got six stars. Then the second match between Omega and Okada a few months later at Dominion 6.11 he gave 6.25 stars. A year later, at Dominion 6.9, the Omega/Okada 2 out of 3 falls title match he scored seven stars. The first Omega/Okada match sort of acted as a breakthrough moment, as since then Meltzer has awarded more matches to those he believes deserve it, mostly crediting the newer age of wrestling for having better in-ring action than before.
Bryan Alvarez of Wrestling Observer rated the The Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkoff vs. The Bushwhackers match at the 1998 PPV, Heroes of Wrestling, "minus more stars than there are stars in the universe, and the universe is infinite". Similarly, Dave Meltzer rated the match as "Absolute Zero stars" ^note(-459.67 stars on the Fahrenheit scale, or -273.15 stars on the Celsius scale).
- The 2025 WrestleCon match between Minoru Suzuki and Eric "Butterbean" Esch was the second match to receive "Absolute Zero stars" by Meltzer.
WrestleCrap's description of the Black Scorpion’s final appearance, where he landed in a spaceship, says, "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the ultimate in stupidity, this rates 178".
The Wrestling Observer Newsletter famously popularized the use of the star rating in wrestling reviews, with anything below zero-point-five being deemed a "DUD" and unrankable, and anything below that and going into the negative being something so horrible and offensive it deserved to be called out. Much like how WON rarely gave any match the full five stars (and, nowadays, rarely gives out six stars by openly invoking the idea of a match so good it goes beyond ratings), a minus five stars rating was unheard of... until Bryan Alvarez reviewed the infamous Sharmell/Jenna Morasca match at TNA's Victory Road 2009 and rated it MINUS! FIVE! STARS! The clip eventually became part of Botchamania's first opening and a semi-frequent staple in its earlier years.
Wrestling With Wregret initially stuck to a 1/2-to-4 star rating system (later expanded to 1/2-to-five). The Wedding Gown match at Bash at the Beach 2000 was so pathetic that Bryan Zane introduced zero stars. Later still, Halloween Havoc 1991 and the Van Hammer vs. Doug Sommers match proved so unimaginably bad^note that Zane gave up and rated it -3 stars. Reviews since have used negative stars when Zane feels it necessary.
Meltzer was "impressed" again when he rated the abysmal main event of Hell in a Cell 2019, which ended in a no contest due to kayfabe fear of injury, as "-2 stars".

Stand-Up Comedy

A Running Gag for comedian Gabriel Iglesias is his scale of fatness. There used to be five levels on the scale: "Big", "Healthy", "Husky", "Fluffy", and "DAYUM!". Then he met people who were even fatter than "DAYUM!" and was forced to add a sixth level: "Aw HELL Naw!"
Gabriel: What's the difference? You're still willing to work with Level 5. Example: If you're on an elevator, and you're with your friend, and this really big guy gets on, and you and your friend look at each other, and you're like, "Daaaaayum!" But you still let the big guy ride your elevator. That's the difference. Level 6? You see walking towards your elevator. [monstrous bellow] "Aw HELL naw!" [mashing the Close Door button] [bellow] "NO!" [bellow] "NO! NO!" [kicks fat guy out of elevator as doors close] That's the difference.
- And while stated in response to a complaint about not having tshirts available in the person's size ("Keep in mind, I go all the way up to 5X."), the reason for an addition instead of being a part of the list from the beginning was "I didn't know they MADE you!"

Tabletop Games

Magic: The Gathering:
- Head designer Mark Rosewater has a "Storm Scale" of how unlikely he thinks it is for a particular mechanic to return to Standard, so named because the infamous Game Breaking mechanic "Storm" is the definition of a 10. The only mechanic he's ever given an 11 is That One Useless Useful Scrappy Mechanic, "Bands with other".
- Various tournament formats have their respective banlists, but Vintage is the only format where all cards, no matter how absurdly broken (such as the legendary Power Nine), are legal, although the strongest cards are nevertheless restricted to one copy per deck, with only truly problematic cards being flat out banned for reasons outside gameplay and power level (such as ante cards which run afoul with real-life gambling laws). However, Lurrus of the Dream-Den proved itself so overpowered even in Vintage that it became the very first (and so far only) card banned in a format where the most powerful game breakers are legal. This ban was only lifted when Companion mechanic, an overall-overpowered mechanic that Lurrus and a handful other broken cards have, was nerfed.
SandTrap, a reviewer of the early days of Pojo's Yu-Gi-Oh! Card of the Day, had a habit of doing this quite often, at one point complaining about the fact that the site disapproved of his giving bad cards ludicrously negative ratings, when all cards are supposed to be rated from 1 to 5. A notable example is in his review of Bite Shoes, a card which he gave a rating of -75.3 out of 5 and said that he would give anyone using it a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown until they died.

Video Games

In Retropokon, Skapokon gave Bakushow (also known as LOL in the USA and Archime DS in Japan) a -1/10, and even refused to call it a "game".
Yahoo! Games gave Batman: Arkham City a 6 out of 5.
Game Pro Magazine, in the January 1997 issue, gave Battle Arena Toshinden URA for the Sega Saturn a 0.5 fun factor. Up until that point, the lowest score a game could get in ANY category (Graphics, Sound, Control, Fun Factor) was a 1.0. This (along with a rather negative fan reaction to the reviewer faces they were using at this time) was probably what prompted Gamepro to change their reviewing faces in the next issue.
Amiga Concept, a French Amiga magazine, gave a -31% score to the Porting Disaster of Battletoads.
Apparently, Net Jak rewrote its code so that it could give Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing a zero.
In his step-by-step reviews of every single Pokémon, Bogleech typically reviews each Pokémon a scale of 'one to five Poké Balls'. Some Pokémon, however, receive a rating of ' five gold Poké Balls', meant to mark Pokémon he considers outright personal favorites, while Pokémon he considers personal least favorites earn a rating of 'rotting, rancid Lucario skull' out of five.
Swedish gaming magazine Super PLAY gave Brütal Legend 11/10. There were likely a few reasons for this, one being that 'this one goes to eleven' just fits the nature of the game, the other one being that it was the last issue of the magazine and they broke quite a few rules in it.
Civilization V: In a nod to the infamous Nuclear Gandhi Urban Legend of Zelda Gandhi has his "Nuke Production" and "Use of Nukes" parameter set at 12 out of 10. This still functions as a 10 ingame, but it means that even if Gandhi takes social policies or similar abilities that would alter his AI priority to focus less on nukes, the minimum it can go is still a 10.
Club Penguin: A now-defunct Wiki had a Party Ratings page, where the users could write their own reviews for each of the game's monthly parties and grade it on a scale of one to five, and so afterwards every review's grade would be summed up into the party's total score from one to five. For a while, the lowest-rated party was the Music Jam 2014, with a score of merely 0.7. This ended up changing in 2016, when the game was already widely considered to be going downhill, with the infamous sponsored parties becoming the norm, and many parties lasting several months. Then came the "Frozen Fever Party 2016", which not only was a takeover about a short that aired more than one year prior, it was an actual complete rehash of the previous Frozen Fever party that originally happened when the short originally came out in 2015, to the point of literally reutilizing the SWF files for it, thus undoing most changes that happened to the game between the span of the two parties, and lasted for more than one month itself. The party was so unanimously despised by the players that it received a rating of -0.13, being the only party in the game's history to receive a negative score on the wiki.
Computer Gaming World, which normally bottomed out at 1 star, had an ‘unholy trinity’ of games that received zero: Postal 2 for its extremely offensive content, as well as Mistmare and Dungeon Lords for not qualifying as finished games.
Game Players Magazine gave Cosmic Race a 0% (the only game to ever have this "honor") and even named the rating after the game; the next range up (1–9%) is "Shoot me" just to let the reader know how bad they felt the game was.
The Angry Video Game Nerd claimed CrazyBus, a "game" (actually a tech demo) with no enemies, no obstacles, only one screen, awful graphics for a Sega Genesis game, an atrocious soundtrack, and no goal or purpose whatsoever other than driving the bus forward and backward by holding the D-Pad left or right for eternity broke the 'shit scale' and somehow managed to outclass in awfulness the two other games he had reviewed that he originally claimed were the worst games ever made, "Desert Bus" and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.
Youtube reviewer Jauwn, who specializes in reviewing crypto games from a gamer's perspective, gives each rating category a point value that can dip into the negatives if the result is beyond bad. As such, CryptoFights was given a -5/5 in the "Use of crypto/NFT tech" category as not only the blockchain doesn't improve the gameplay, but it actively makes it worse. The game totals a rating of -12/100.
TOM from Toonami gave The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim a 100/10 (while the expansion Dawnguard only got an 8/10).
Electronic Gaming Monthly:
- Averted by EGM — at the beginning and end of the column’s lifespan, "Seanbaby's Rest of the Crap" was for games that would warrant zeroes and negative scores on the normal rating scale used by the other reviewers. Pretty much the only reason he was doing this was for the humor value, since, as the very premise states, even the best of the games he reviewed were all the worst in shovelware.
- Also played straight: The Guy Game, Mortal Kombat Advance and Ping Pals all received 0.0s from one of the 3 reviewers (with Ping Pals getting two zeroes).
In a video by the french youtuber l'Ermite Moderne, he ranked the top five Surprisingly Creepy Moments in retro video games. After being done with the top one, he proceeded to pretend to be done with the video, but before he could leave he was interrupted by another entry: the war against Giygas, as number zero on the list.
X-Play awarded the infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial a ‘Zero’ out of five, measured on a scale that bottoms out at 1. Particularly noteworthy because, as detailed elsewhere, they'd also had a segment where they detailed several games that they refused to rate rather than break the scale for.
The website Game Revolution often rates the video games it reviews on a five-star scale (with 1 star being the lowest). The first (and so far only) game to earn a zero-star rating from them was the Wii U minigame compilation Family Party: 30 Great Games Obstacle Arcade, citing that every single aspect of the game, right down to the title, was horrible.
Fate/Grand Order rates most Servants on a scale of one star to five stars, with (in general) the one-star Servants being the weakest and most common and the five-stars being the strongest and rarest. Angra Mainyu, though, is considered in-story and out to be so horribly weak that he is rated a zero-star Servant.^note Ironically, he's also regarded as even rarer than a five-star.
Fire Emblem: Awakening is another game to rate its DLC maps with a star system. One star is easy and five stars is difficult. The map known as Apotheosis forgoes this and is only described with but one word. "Insane".
In-game example: the "Turn it up to 11" achievement in Game Dev Tycoon requires that a reviewer give a score of 11/10 to one of your games. It's not easy, as you need the game to be utterly perfect to even stand a chance.
Girls' Frontline rates Tactical Dolls from two stars to five, with with lower ratings generally equating to being more common, easier to acquire, and requiring fewer cores for dummy-linking, but with less power and potential for growth as they're leveled up. Later added were neural upgrades to boost a T-Doll's abilities further, the last of which bumps up their star rating by one (or two, in the case of a 2-star), which in the case of a Doll that's already 5-stars boosts them up to a new 6-star rating.
Gitadora: In GuitarFreaks and DrumMania V5: Rock to Infinity, the song "Rock to Infinity" had a difficulty rating of infinity out of 99 for all instruments on Extreme difficulty. In the following game, it was re-rated to 99.
Guitar Hero got at least one 11/10 review (as yet another This Is Spın̈al Tap reference).
Half-Life 2 was awarded an 11/10 by Maximum PC magazine. At the end of a rare-for-that-publication exclusive 5-page spread. If this took place in a gaming magazine, it would indicate an incredible amount of marketing control over the content of the magazine; as it is, with Maximum PC being a hardware-centric publication that happens to review games on occasion, and the long spreads devoted to a single game being a rarity rather than the norm, it just stands out as extreme fanboyism.
JarekTheGamingDragon's "Top 7 FPS Pistols Of All Time", after the honorable mentions before the #1 spot, had to take a moment to explain that he was taking the Halo: Combat Evolved pistol and tossing it out of consideration entirely to give it its own "God" rank, because it's just so good that it would have been a guaranteed win and there was no other way to include it while being even remotely fair to any other pistol from any other FPS; without it in the regular consideration, the top slot went to Killing Floor 2's dual Desert Eagles. The fan poll on his Discord server included it normally and, under the (ultimately correct) assumption that it would win anyway, he asked the viewers to vote for two pistols rather than just one, essentially "really" asking to vote for their second-place choice, which ended up being the Half-Life 2 Python (the only surprise being that the Halo pistol didn't beat it by anywhere near as wide a margin as Jarek was expecting).
In one episode of Judgement Day, Tommy gave the game High Heat Baseball 2003 a 0.0. He really disliked the game and thought it had no good qualities.
Jimquisition usually uses .5 decimals, but the review of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD broke this pattern by by giving it, naturally, an 8.8.
Polish magazine CD-Action gave Limbo of the Lost a negative score for plagiarism alone.
Ross's Game Dungeon usually gives out a maximum of three awards at the end of every review, usually detailing the most interesting or noteworthy aspects of the game. Maabus had so many interesting elements, that Ross decided to give it an extra fourth award: Best Story by a Six-Year-Old.
An in-game example of a similar system, but not used for ratings: In NetHack, wands and other magical items that have magical charges normally have some whole number of charges, between zero and a positive whole number, inclusive. If they run out by being used down to zero, they can (usually) be recharged. If you zap a wand of cancellation (whose spell is meant to erase magical effects) at them, their number of charges is set to –1: They can’t be recharged at all, even if you have scrolls of charging.
Each of the Downloadable Content map packs for New Super Mario Bros. 2 has a difficulty rating from one to five stars. The second hardest set, Nerve-Wrack Pack, is rated five stars. The hardest, the Impossible Pack, is rated "DANGER!"
Computer + Video Games reviewer Tim Metcalfe, who viewed bullfighting as Sick and Wrong, gave Ole, Toro a 0 (out of 10) in all categories but value, which was "less than 0."
IGN sometimes gives out a score of less than 1 out of 10, but only ever gave a zero once for a video game, for Olympic Hockey Nagano ’98 (the first thing they ever gave that score), because it was exactly the same game as Wayne Gretzky Hockey ’98 with a Palette Swap.
Ellen of Outside Xtra is arachnophobic, so she and Luke made a series of videos — three between 2016 and 2023 — in which Luke would show her footage of spiders in video games and Ellen would rate them from 1 to 10 on a "Fear-O-Meter" rather than on a scale of quality. The first spider to break the scale was The Frostbite Spider from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for which she just said that the Fear-O-Meter was broken. (Lucky it was the final spider of that video.) The second was the Large Nightmare Apostle from Bloodborne, which she actually gave a number: 11.
For a fictional example (albeit one based on a real incident, as detailed on this page), there’s this Penny Arcade strip. After enough bribes have been heaped up, Donkey Konga 2 winds up with an 11 out of 5 at Gamespy.
Australian magazine N64 Gamer gave Perfect Dark a rating of 101%, with a part of their long review dedicated to why the rating was 101% instead of just 100%.
When it comes to Pokémon's metagame, Pokémon are ranked on Smogon by tier from Uber to Never Used. However, Mega Rayquaza turned out to be so broken (in fact, the most broken Pokémon in the history of the franchise) that it actually got banned from Ubers and a new "tier" called Anything Goes had to be created just to house it! In short, Mega Rayquaza has in fact broke the metagame! The only other things to be banned to Anything Goes since then are Arceus in the Gen 4 metagame (albeit retroactively), Crowned Sword Zacian, the Dynamax mechanic in general, and Shadow Rider Calyrex in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.
The Repton Resource Page rates the difficulty of individual Repton 3 levels on a 0–10 scale. Levels in the Expansion Packs exceeded a ‘10’ rating so often that the scale was changed to "more skulls = harder" without any specific maximum. So far, the highest rating given is 16.
Hex and Bajo (of Good Game) gave Robot Unicorn Attack an utterly "ridonkulous" score of 8971 rubber chickens (a standard unit on the show) out of 20.
NGamer gave the Nintendo DS game Secret Flirts II a score of -47, calling it "a hateful piece of software".
SomecallmeJohnny gave Superman 64 a –64/10.
Super Mario Galaxy was given 11/10◊ by the Italian Official Nintendo Magazine. As the magazine had always been known for being far too generous regarding scores to Nintendo games, some readers were outraged.
PC Power Play, which has a ten-point scale, gave The War Z (now known as Infestation: Survivor Stories) a rating of 0/10.
When the original Wing Commander was released in 1990, it broke several scales in the positive direction. Dragon, for example, rated it as six out of five stars.
Zero Punctuation does not give numerical scores at all, but the original Portal still effectively broke the "scale". Yahtzee, who usually portrays games as horribly flawed and unplayable regardless of whether he likes them or not, said nothing negative about Portal and summarized his opinion as "...absolutely sublime from start to finish, and I will jam forks in my eyes if I ever use those words to describe anything else ever again."
- Ride to Hell: Retribution won the Zero Punctuation "Lifetime Achievement Award for Total Abhorrence" in his Top 5 of 2013 episode instead of winning a slot on the Bottom 5 (led by Call of Duty: Ghosts), it being so horrible it wasn't even worthy of being the top worst game of that year. Consequently, when he later ranked his best and worst games of each year of the 2010s, Ride to Hell was listed outside of the Worst list (whose #1 was Hunt Down the Freeman) with a question mark, and pictured with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand.

Web Animation

Showvember: In "This Is All Your Fault", Vegetable gets voted out with 44 votes, despite it being a contestant vote, with only five people on their team.

Webcomics

Cucumber Quest uses video-game-styled profile pictures on the cast page that list the characters’ stats and inventory. Several of them break the rating scale.
- Cucumber’s dad, Lord Cabbage, has a Jerk rating that goes above the five star metric. He's the only one who even has a "Jerk" rating.
  - Likewise, Splashmaster's Attack rating goes above five as well.
- Saturday's inventory is just "everybody else's stuff".
- All of Peridot's stats just say "better than Almond".
- All of Cordelia's stats are rated as Unknown.
- The Big Bad, Nightmare Knight, breaks the rating scale on every possible stat, and his entire inventory is unknown.
- Cosmo takes this further, with his stats and inventory both being listed as Unknown.
In Freefall, Raibert subverts this. When asked if something is a ten on a "How bad is it?" scale, he says 8.5 — nothing is a ten, because things can always get worse.
Sexy Losers is the highest scoring entry on the List Of Potentially Offensive Webcomics, having been awarded six "toilets" out of a possible five.
In Skin Horse, Gerda has broken the Kinsey Scale — she's "a Kinsey Seven, a type of lesbian so profound it was previously thought not to exist in nature". Which, of course, in no way means she doesn't want to see Tip and Konstantin mud-wrestling, same as every other female character in the strip.

Web Original

Filmmaker Dan Bell has two main series on his YouTube channel: one where he explores dying/dead malls, and another where he explores creepy and/or sleazy hotels and motels across the country with his friends. They often rate the properties on a 1-5 scale with 5 being best, given how rundown they are. After discovering a motel in Maryland where the rooms were literally covered in blood, one of Bell's companions gave the room a 0.
Bogleech: In the reviews of Pokémon characters from the Gen 1 games and anime, Wojcik apparently feels so strongly about Team Rocket that he gives them a ten... out of five.
On Cinema: Tim has at times given films six bags of popcorn (the show's version of star ratings) despite claiming the highest rating is 5 bags of popcorn (although, there is sometimes inconsistency with what the highest rating is).
Plumbing the Death Star: One episode ranks Super Smash Bros. 64's cast's stepfathering ability on a scale of ten. Things start off pretty bad when the two Pokémon both get zeroes for being wild animals, but things get even worse with Donkey Kong, a wild ape who can't talk, and worse, comes with in-laws. He gets a negative ten out of ten.
The fact-checking website Politifact.com rates statements (from politicians, media commentators, Facebook posts, and such) on a scale of truthfulness: True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, and False. Then there's Pants On Fire, for a statement that is obviously false, laughably stupid and/or has already been disproven multiple times. Each rating on the scale is depicted with a galvanometer-type gauge, and for Pants On Fire, the gauge itself in on fire.
Seanbaby gave the Challenge of the Super Friends version of the Riddler a –1. He gave Aquaman a 1. He did explain the logic behind it: Riddler is as useless as an ordinary human being would be against the Superfriends, and then makes it worse by giving away the Legion of Doom's plans in his puzzles. He's actually a 2 for the heroes' side subtracted from his basic 1, making The Riddler, "as useless as an ordinary human being", a better hero than Aquaman. An earlier version of the page gave Marvin, Wendy, Wonder Dog, and Gleek all a zero, ranking them below Aquaman. Unlike Riddler, there wasn't any special logic besides them just being that useless.

Web Videos

On Atop the Fourth Wall, Linkara lists the "Top 15 Worst Comics I've Ever Reviewed." However, before he begins, he notes that Holy Terror, of course, is the worst comic he's reviewed, so he's taking that off the list just so that the #1 spot will be a surprise. Technically, this makes the list "Top 15 Worst Comics I've Ever Reviewed, Other than Holy Terror," but that wasn't as catchy.
Brutalmoose:
- In his "Brutalfoods" review of Lunchables pizza, he assigns "Ian Points" to the various boxes. For the first meal (all-cheese pizzas) he grants it 10 points for the pizzas themselves, 8 for the Capri-Sun drink, and 15 for the Air Head dessert... then takes away 100 for the incredibly terrible comic that came with it, giving it a final score of -67. For the second (pepperoni and cheese) he grants 2 for the pizza, 9 for the Capri-Sun and 10 for the Crunch bar, then takes away 500 for another comic that is not only terrible, but is in fact the exact same one as the first, leaving it at -479. The third (deep-dish) gets 5 for the pizza, 3 for the Cheez-Its, 7 for the fruit roll-up, 1 for the Kool-Aid mix, 20 for the water bottle the Kool-Aid goes into... and then takes away 20,000 because he decided to put at least a bit of all the other ingredients into the Kool-Aid and drink it all at once, to which he jokes "they didn't tell me that I had to do this, but it's still their fault somehow" and leaving it with -19,964 points. By the time of the fourth (a "healthier" organic version) he's crossing over into the Meaningless Value area, giving it no Ian Points whatsoever and, when summing up the scores at the end, labeling it as simply "BAD".
- For his review of several Twinkies recipes, he instead decides to simply rank them in a top-4 list - which ends up ranking the Twinkie wiener sandwich as #85 out of 4 because it was so bad, and then skips #2 entirely because, while he liked the Twinkie grasshopper milkshake (enough that, purely by how much he liked it, he said it would have otherwise been tied with the deep-fried Twinkie), he felt the Twinkie was too incidental to that recipe; anything similarly sugary and creamy could be substituted without noticeably changing the final result.
In Demo Reel, Jimmy Boyd's movie Jingle Sells received 0.2 stars on IMDb. The lowest rating a movie can receive is 1.
Double Toasted's rating system mostly corresponds to a four-star scale: "Full Price", "Matinee", "Rental" and "Some Ol' Bullshit". They break the scale on both ends: On the "Better than good" scale, there's "Better than Sex". On the opposite end, there's "Fuck You" — reserved for the worst of the worst or a movie that pushed one of the hosts' Berserk Buttons.
When rating the use of English in a music video the Eat Your Kimchi scale is 1–5 with 5 the highest rating. Simon gave rapper G. Dragon a 37 out of 5 for the English in Get Your Crayon.
Fasion Photo Ruview is a web series in which Raja and Raven, alumni of RuPaul's Drag Race, give their opinions on various fashion outfits, most often the runways from that week's episode of Drag Race but also sometimes actual runways or drag queen's social media posts. The show uses a simple two-point scale for the most part; "Toot" if a look is good, "Boot" if it's bad. However, there have been certain outfits on the show that have caused the two to go beyond the two-point system, in both directions:
- Chi Chi DeVayne's Book Ball outfit, which she made entirely out of paper by herself, was deemed to go beyond a Toot in terms of quality, and led to Raja inventing the "Shoot" to appreciate its excellence. Several exceptional looks since have received Shoots.
- ... On the other end of the scale, while Kim Chi and Naomi Smalls were rating several of Raja and Raven's looks, they were confused by an outfit of Raja's that looked like it was pulled out of the closet, and crowned the "Scoot" for looks worse than just a Boot.
- Upon seeing Peppermint's poorly-done & mismatched makeover of a crew member, Raja called it a "Poot" because of how bad it was. When Raven pointed out that Scoot already exists, Raja claimed "A Poot's worse than a Scoot." Meaning Peppermint's outfit was so bad it broke an already broken rating scale!
- Raja felt so saddened by Dusty Ray Bottom's martian look that she gave it a "Bless": A rating which encompasses when you see an outfit and say "aw, bless" and can't bring yourself to judge it further.
- During Season 10's Mermaid runway, Aja served as a stand-in judge for Raven. She believed that Monique Heart's look met the baseline expectations of a mermaid-themed runway, but didn't go above or beyond in any way, leading her to create "Noot" for a look she felt truly neutral about. Raven, however, rejects this term when Raja tries to use it in a later episode, insisting that every look should be rated one way or another, and it's scarcely popped up since.
- For Naomi Small's stunning Final Four look on All Stars 4, Raja and Aquaria both give it a Shoot, but Raja further gives it a "Gawdammit", the only emotion she is able to convey over the look.
- One week, Katya and Violet Chachki are tasked with reviewing Taylor Swift's runway looks, after openly admitting there are not big Taylor Swift fans. After tearing into many of her looks in a row, they decided to break the tradition of giving a "Top Toot of the Week" to the look they most like, and instead reward a "Top Boot of the Week" to the look they hated most.
Fiery Discourse:
- The hosts ranked Charmcaster from Ben 10: Omniverse all perfect 10/10s, with one cohost going to far as to give her an 11 out of 10.
- The same thing would later happen with Ash's Dragonite complete with her getting another 11 out of 10.
- The third one to have it happen is Tricerachops with her getting a perfect score.
- Sylvia from Wander over Yonder was the next character to get 10/10s across the board.
- Ank from Ivar, Time Walker, also managed to get a perfect score.
- Mona Lisa from the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles recieved 10/10s across the board.
- Sheba the Sea Serpent from Sweet Sea got a perfect score as well, even more impressive considering it was four weeks since the previous one.
- Cuca from the 2003 version of Sitio do Picapau Armarelo would get a perfect score less than two weeks after the previous one.
- Aurorus from Pokèmon XY gets a perfect score for not only having a great design but being a fantastic character as well, with the hosts noting how much agency the episode gave her.
- The Rhedosaurus also gets a perfect score due to the amazing animation that Ray Harryhausen did with the character, with Mathmachine going so far as to say it feels alive in every way possible.
- Maleficent's second appearance on the podcast "rectifies an injustice" by giving her a perfect score instead of the 8/10s she originally received.
- Joanna the Goanna receives a perfect score for being such a well rounded character while not being able to speak, with the hosts lauding Frank Welker's vocal performances and her facial expressions.
- Crusch Lulu gets 10/10s, not only for her fantastic design and personality, but also because of how well written her character is for her first episode.
- Fang gets a perfect score for being one of the most fleshed out and well written characters seen on the podcast to date, with Mathmachine noting how her and Spear make up two halves of a whole character.
- The dinosaurs for Jurassic Park gets 10/10s in comparision to the previous episode where two of the hosts gave them 7/10 and 5/10 respectfully, partially out of respect for Sam Neill.
Jauwn frequently gives scores below 0 to the games he reviews (for example, Red Chaos, a barely-modified version of Unreal Engine's "Lyra" sample game with blockchain integration, got a -12/10), to the point where it's probably faster to list the games he's looked at that have a positive score.
JelloApocalypse's "Every [blank] Reviewed in Ten Words or Less" series initially used a positive/negative 1-10 scale (with the positives being based on genuine enjoyment and the negatives being based on So Bad, It's Good factor), but he felt the need to add a 0 after watching Monsters vs. Aliens. Since then, a few other movies have also gotten stuck with one.
The Online Warrior has, now that Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has run its DLC course, rated every trailer the game had to offer out of 10, as part of a then-ongoing series to rate every Smash trailer. By his own admission, by Ultimate the art of making the trailers had been refined to a sheen, with a lot of trailers getting 10/10's. Both Terry and Sora, however, got an 11/10. Sephiroth? 15/10.
Rata of Rank10YGO uses either a 1-3 scale or a 1-5 scale in various categories to grade archetypes, but gave the Sparrow Family series a 0/5 on every category, with the exception of Versatility (which dictates the kinds of threats the deck can be built to respond to), which got a -1/5. As he put it, "these guys could lose to a deck of Uno cards."
Schaffrillas Productions:
- In his ranking of the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe courses, Schaff, upon request, ranks the Battle Mode courses from the original iteration of Mario Kart 8. As these were existing courses and none of them were built for Battle Mode, he ranks them in reverse order and expresses heightened frustration with them, to the point where nearly all of them are F-Tier^note. In particular, he called Toad's Turnpike so deeply painful of an experience that he doesn't think F-tier accurately conveys his feelings toward it, and assigns it to G-Tier.
- In his ranking of everything he's ever ranked last place in all of his previous ranking videos, Schaff shows that, alongside the Battle Mode version of Toad's Turnpike, he'd also rank The Hunchback of Notre Dame II and Hop in G-Tier. However, his choice for the number one spot, Surf's Up 2: WaveMania, he considers so awful that it goes even beyond the G-Tier ranking and right into H-Tier, as well as being a film that he'd give a 0/10 score.
In Scott The Woz's video covering E3 1995, the same video that introduced his five knee-slap scale (a standard for his videos covering the various E3 conferences, keeping this from being a Meaningless Comparison), Sony's "$299" moment^Explanation: caused Scott to slap his knee at such a rapid and continuous rate that he was visibly scarred and bloody, going up to fourteen knee-slaps before the video cut away from Scott slapping his knee.
Vampires SMP: At the start of Episode 2, Vampire Hunter Avid hosts a house judging contest, with the score rating how well the house can hold off vampires. Since vampires Must Be Invited into someone's place of residence, Martyn's house having a sign completely forbidding visitors impresses Avid enough to award him a 6/5.
The crew of Wreckless Eating ordinarily rate the dishes they eat on a scale of one to five (insert reviewer's name) faces, but they've encountered so many awful foods that they've had to extend the scale downward. Anything they would only eat again if they were starving to death gets a Big F.U.; anything they still wouldn't touch if they were starving to death receives 5 out of 5 F.U.'s.

Western Animation

The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: In one episode, Jimmy and his friends somehow manage to win 8th place in a contest with only 7 entrants.
The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Line", Larry the movie clerk informs the Watterson that so many people were filling up the seats to see the movie, that they had to make their own alphabet to make more rows and declares they'll be seated in row "cleft".
Richard: I hate cleft! That was my grade average at school.
The Emperor's New School: In one episode, Yzma creates a clone of Kuzco to fail all of his classes. At one point he gets a G- on a test.
Family Guy: In "Emmy Winning Episode", the Griffins parody Modern Family to win an emmy. But unfortunately, they get a report back from the academy that they hated the episode so much they started giving them negative emmies, and now they owe them an emmy.
Gravity Falls: In "Mabel's Guide to Life", Soos somehow scores a twelve out of five on Mabel's dating quiz.
Soos: My grandma was right all along, I am the world's most perfect man! [angelic music plays as a ray of light shines on him and birds perch on his arms]
Inside Job: In "Sex Machina", the attractiveness-judging algorithm gives Glenn a score of zero... on a 1 to 10 scale.
Johnny Bravo: In one episode, Johnny and Suzy enter a competition where (thanks to Johnny) they get 18th place in when there were only twelve contestants.
Regular Show:
- "High Score", Mordecai’s first attempt at playing Broken Bonez was so terrible that he ended up getting negative points, to Rigby's disbelief.
- In "Birthday Gift", Rigby is trying to make a videogame for Mordecai, and he has to pass physical and intellectual tests, that are graphed. His results in the intellectual test are so low that his result doesn't even appear on the graph; conversely, the physical test results were so high that the graph's upper limit wasn't high enough to correctly gauge his result.
The Simpsons: In "Strong Arms of the Ma", Marge develops agoraphobia after being mugged by a hobo. During an attempt by the family to help Marge overcome her agoraphobia, she is told to describe her anxiety level using a number from one to ten. However, while Homer attempts to get rid of a beehive, Marge says "12," then "15". When the swarm of bees attack the family, Marge screams, "703!"

Other

Air pollution in The New '10s in China has gotten so bad that it broke the Air Quality Index used by the EPA, which once topped out at 500. In 2013 the @beijingair Twitter account, which used readings from the US embassy there, was forced to coin a new term for AQI above 500; fittingly, it was "Beyond Index".
The US Armed Forces' service-independent aptitude test, the ASVAB, can work like this. Someone who scores well on, for example, the Air Force's score breakdown will completely annihilate the Army's breakdown.
The January 1985 issue of Britain's Car magazine had a comparison test of four "poverty" cars: the Citroën 2CV, the Lada Riva, the Reliant Rialto, and the Škoda Estelle. For the occasion, they made up a rating system called the "Cavalier Rating", where a car got 10 points in a category if it was as good as a Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6 GL and no points if it was as bad as a Fiat 126. The three-wheeled Rialto was given a "handling/stability" rating of -5.
- The Rialto also had the only "10" rating in the test, for "fuel efficiency". However, one wonders how meaningful that is, since a Fiat 126 is likely to have better fuel efficiency than a Vauxhall Cavalier.
Dark Bunny Sauces are rated from 0-10, with empty and filled-in pepper symbols demonstrating the heat rating on the bottle itself (0 depicts all peppers as empty, 10/10 shows them all filled). Bradley's Blood, Nuclear Narwhal, Obscure Octopus, Rabbit's Revenge, and both versions of Terrified Trashpanda (tea-based and coffee-bassed) clock in at 11/10; the tenth pepper is depicted as bursting. Then there's Wailing Werecat which takes this type even further by going up to 12.
The Dvorak Intensity Scale, used to measure hurricane intensity, maxes out at 8.0. Hurricane Patrica registered an 8.3
In the aftermath of the 2009 Australian bushfires, authorities introduced a new fire danger category above "Extreme", named "Catastrophic—Code Red".
Hurricanes are rated from category 1 to 5 based on wind speed and the damage they cause, increasing in about 20 mph increments. A category 5 hurricane needs to exceed 157 mph. Some climatologists suggest adding a category 6 since some hurricanes now have windspeeds far higher than 180 mph (290 kmh).
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy was renamed "Superstorm" Sandy by many commentators, as it wasn't technically a hurricane by the time it landed, but the size of the storm and destruction it caused (the second-costliest on record for the United States until 2017) was well beyond that of a "mere" tropical storm.
After Swedish football defender Glenn Hysen pretty much single-handedly kept England from scoring in the away match during the qualifications for the 1990 World Cup, the newspaper Expressen rated his performance as six out of five. To this day, he's the only player to get that rating.
Jew or Not Jew rates how Jewish people are on a scale of 0–15 based on heritage, appearance/behavior, and how proud they would be to have them as Jews. Adolf Hitler, naturally, got a –1 on the last one, with a total score of 0 (weighed down by a 1 in appearance).
In the United States, the USDA rates meat quality from Canner to Prime on grades 1–5. The Japanese-made Wagyu beef past a certain grade (notably the A5 grade) has a reputation for being un-rateable due to being too good.
In physics, the Mohs scale of hardness is defined as capping out at 10 with diamond, which was at the time the hardest substance known to man. Aggregated diamond nanorod, or "hyperdiamond", is much harder than diamond and thus goes off the top of the scale.
Oil prices at Canadian gas stations used to be advertised with large placards that only go up to 99.9 cents/litre. When gas prices finally went through the dollar/litre ceiling in 2009, there was a lot of bitter joking on the streets of Toronto over the "suddenly cheap gas" as gas stations were forced to display the new prices as 4.7 for 104.7 cents/litre.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rates the safety of cars on a scale of 1–5 stars. The Tesla Motors Model S electric car got a score of 5.4 stars. Apparently, not having an engine up front gives the Model S a large crumple zone.
- Tesla's follow up, the Model S P85D, broke the Consumer Reports scale and earned a 103 out of 100.
During the May 3, 1999 tornado outbreak, the National Weather Service introduced a new alert above "Tornado Warning", being "Tornado Emergency", indicating a violent tornado that could produce more damage and more fatalities than usual.

Meaningless Comparison ("Final Score: 7 Bananas.")

Anime and Manga

Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network awarded Silver Spoon with “3 moos out of five” and Free! with "4-pack, halfway to a 6, gotta do more crunches this summer" (probably meaning 4/5).

Comic Books

When Polish Marvel Comics fansite Avalon was running weekly Avalon Pulse - compilation of reviews of new books submitted by forum members - there was no clear rating system, but most people would stick to 1 to 10 or 1 to 6 (like Polish school grading system). However, then were at least two cases when an user hated a book or a bunch of books so badly to replace their usual ratings with Bristol stool scale.

Film

The Dread Central review of Birdemic: 5 out of 5 Exploding Eagles (same as the The 13th Alley review).
In-universe example in Inside Out when Disgust assesses how she, Fear and Anger handled Riley without Joy and Sadness.
Disgust: On a scale of one to ten, I give this day an F.
In film critic Leonard Maltin’s movie guide, he gives the movie Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult a rating of 2⅓ stars, the only time he has given anything a score not in an increment divisible by one-half (or BOMB). In his review of The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, he gives it 2½ stars and parenthetically explains, "What else?"

Live-Action TV

Lampshaded in the The Office (US) episode "Beach Games": Pam is keeping track of the points that Michael gives various competitors in the office games, but Michael keeps changing the method in which he rates them (i.e., a gold star to the winner of event 1, 10 points for event 2, a checkmark in event 3, etc.). The end result is that Pam can’t convert the scores over between events and has no idea who's actually winning.
In Red Dwarf, Dave Lister frequently talks about writing Michelin Guides or similar about various settings, resulting in Legion getting a psycho rating of "four and a half chainsaws, maybe five". Rimmer suggests that the G-Tower from The Tank in series 8 probably gets “the full five slop-out buckets” in the guide to Penal Hell-Holes.
On Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update recurring character Aunt Linda (played by Kristen Wiig) gives such ratings as "seven 'Ghaaas?' and one-and-a-half 'Yougottabe Frigginkiddingme!'" (Note that those were both for one work.)

Music

Music critic Anthony Fantano (The Needle Drop) gave The Lonely Island's Turtleneck and Chain 5 dicks out of 10.

Professional Wrestling

When pro wrestling reviewer Scott Keith has to review a particularly horrendous match, and the 5-star to negative 5-star system fails to express how disgusted he is with the product, he breaks out the "Hot Poker up the Ass" rating system. The general idea behind is that he takes one person (usually the main guy responsible for the horrible show, such as Vince Russo) and rates each segment by the number of hot pokers that person deserves to have shoved up their ass for subjecting viewers to it. Kevin Nash and, during his WCW days, AEW announcer Tony Schiavone have been victims of this as well.
- Another example he used once was the "Shane McMahon Unconditional ReFund" (SMURF), supposedly based on an incident in which a friend of his was sitting behind Shane at a show and got paid actual cash money to quit complaining about the show. Basically, how bad each match was would be measured by the approximate refund amount to justify not complaining about it.
Bryan Alvarez described the nWo Souled Out Pay-Per-View from 1997 as "twenty asses."

Video Games

BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle has official stats for each character measuring their Attack, Speed, Range, Casual^noteHow easy the character is to use, and Luck, on a scale of one to eight stars. For some characters, however, the Luck stat is replaced with something else:
- Rachel Alucard has a Georg score of three frogs, a reference to her using a frog named George XIII extensively in her space control strategies from her home series.
- Iron Tager has a GETB^noteGenesic Emerald Tager Buster score of eight stars.
- Nu-13 has a Ragna score of five hearts.
- Jubei's luck stat is replaced with paw prints, and this stat has a score of four additional sets of paw prints.
- Hakumen has a Counter score of five stars.
- Gordeau has a Grim Reaper score of six stars.
- Carmine has a Blood score or six stars.
- Badass Adorable characters such as Es, Platinum, Orie, and Ruby replace their luck stats with "Kawaii" stats, which range ten to twelve stars.
Penny Arcade has a comic where Gabe and Tycho briefly review Madden 13, ending with a game review score of 9x and 3/🏈🏈.
X-Play regularly gives its review scores nonsensical values, usually related to the game being reviewed, somehow.

Web Video

When Bro Team Pill reviews a game, its rating always nonsensical. F.E.A.R. 2 got a "I would rate this game". Garshasp got a "Cool out of yes". Battlefield 3's review concluded with him reviewing the review video, claiming it's better than his FEAR review.
The Pop Arena grades every Goosebumps book , "[an inanimate object] out of 10."^note
In ProJared's main review videos, he'll give the game he's playing a comedic score that does not fit a numbered rating. Said scores are meant to serve as a metaphorical way to express how he's feels about the game, such as giving Chrono Trigger "a clock without hands out of ten", representing his belief that the game is "timeless". When it comes to his reviews of recently released game, which tend to be more serious than his main review videos, he'll use a regular numerical rating. Starting from his review of Final Fantasy V (his first video after his 2019 Series Hiatus), however, he would ditch the comedic scores.
RamZaes has a series called Fandoms in a Nutshell which ends with him rating the fandom with a nonsensical, but related value out of 10. For example, he gave the Danganronpa fandom a seesaw out of 10.
The Tourettes Guy tried out a mattress at Sears, and only gave the comment "Triple H would shit his pants."
Inverted by JesuOtaku. He normally scores things with some sort of strange unit out of 4 (e.g. Baccano! got "three and a half de-fingerings" and Princess Tutu got "four characters who just won't do what they're told"), but Now and Then, Here and There was so depressing he couldn't bring himself to make fun of it and just used stars.
The "ratings" the monsters from Monster Factory have received include a golf score, a batting average, a wanted level, a movie title, and a computer error.
ProtonJon: when she gives ratings to the romhacks he plays, she will usually let out a few of these, such as:
- Mario’s Wacky World—4 "Captain Falcons driving Sonic like he was an F Zero car" out of 5. "Yes!" "Yes!" "Yes!" "Yes!"
- Super Metroid Omega Boss Battles—4 Henshin-A-Go-Go Babies out of 5.
- Resident Evil 5—Super Jeenius gives it "Resident Evil out of 10", Jon gives it "Football out of 10".
Rata of Rank10YGO rates the Skull Servants' recovery a score of "3/5... but of a different color" because while they can get back on track fairly easily, it's less because their recovery ability is better than average and more because their game plan (put King of the Skull Servants on field, attack something) is so basic it takes almost no effort to turn back on.
SsethTzeentach very rarely gives a straightforward score to any games he reviews. Anything that isn't a blatant 10/10, he'll give it "a (very/extremely) good/high score", an explicitly arbitrary rating, or grades them using some items or abstract concept out of another abstract game item/concept (Ex. He gave SYNTHETIK a 325 Terror Level (about to go to 350) out of "[his] rapidly depleting health bar") or something nonsensical (Eg. He gave Caves of Qud whatever a logarithmic spiral on a TI-83 calculator is supposed to mean).

Web Original

In a filler video between two Let's Plays, Chip Cheezum did a parody review of Grand Theft Auto V (the video itself only consisting of one of the protagonists getting a bike stuck in his aunt's sofa for a few minutes). At the end the screen displayed "FINAL SCORE:" with a image of the poster for Citizen Kane as the score.
YouTuber FUNKe sometimes reviews video games, and when he does so, the rating scale is based on Weezer albums, with their first "Blue Album" being the standard, and the score being any of their other albums according to FUNKe's opinion.
Josh Strife Hayes' Worst MMO Ever? series rarely gives straight ratings out of 10, opting to give the MMOs he plays an odd but still apt description of his experience (e.g. NosTale got a Broken Tutorial Window/10, Vindictus got a Disappointing Abandoned Lovechild of Guild Wars and TERA/10, etc.). Aura Kingdom was the rare time he did give an actual score, mainly because it was good enough to avoid an insulting joke rating, but not good enough for an endearing one.
Internet movie reviewer Jeremy Jahns normally rates movies with a descriptive statement, ranging from "Awesometacular!" (the best) and "It's a good time, no alcohol required" (third best) to "Dogshit!" (the worst). He gave The Smurfs 2 "Smurfshit!" He also gave The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 and Fifty Shades of Grey a "Black screen of nothing" rating.
Letterboxd uses stars for its rating scales, but for Portrait of a Lady on Fire they replaced the stars with flames.
In one of the Teen Girl Squad shorts on Homestar Runner, Cheerleader's attempt at diving into the mouth of a live lion is rated at “3 noses?”

Other

On a scale from Katniss Everdeen to Ned Stark, how much would you say you trust the government? Dale Gribble.

Meaningless Value ("Up Yours out of 10.")

Anime and Manga

Zac Bertschy from Anime News Network was infamous for these during the annual season previews, especially harem comedies and ecchi shows. Here's a list:
- 07-Ghost got a "whatever".
- Astarotte's Toy got a "doesn't matter".
- Asura Cryin' got an emoticon of an angry smiley head banging itself against a wall... out of 5. The middle of the preview is adorned with a picture of a bunny and an invitation to move along.
- B Gata H Kei got a "spro-oi-oi-oingggg!! aoooooogggaaahh!".
- CLANNAD After Story got a "whatever it is you think the rating should be (of 5, but you can change that scale if you need to because it might be unfair)", supposedly to mock fan demand for "objective" reviews.
- Cross Ange got a 'nope nope nope nope nope' out of five.
- Cuticle Detective Inaba got a "zilch".
- Day Break Illusion got a "heavy, ragged sigh".
- Fairy Tail got a "screw this".
- High School D×D got a "boobs".
- Highschool of the Dead got a "who cares, zombies".
- Infinite Stratos got a rating of “quiet I am trying to nap here”, a preview that cut off into ZZZZZZZZ halfway through, and a video of a cute kitten as a better alternative for something to watch.
- Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel got a "guh". He ended the review with a picture of a rabbit pouting to express his feelings on the show.
- Kiss X Sis got a Picard facepalm instead of a rating. He also edited the screenshot used with many "NO"'s and "WHY"'s.
- Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne got a "zzzzzzz".
- The Legend of the Legendary Heroes got a bored face.
- Linebarrels of Iron got a "welp time to hang myself" out of 5.
- Listen to me, girls. I am your father! was rated thusly:
  Rating if you think this sounds hilarious and sexy: probably 6 out of 5 or something
  Rating if this makes you nauseous: stay way, REDLINE is out on bluray next week right?
- Mayo Chiki! got a "blergh".
- Mysterious Girlfriend X got some sort of music file for a rating. Considering the rest of the review, it's safe to say it's of this category.
- Oni Ai got an "another one of these, oh boy" due to its Sibling Incest premise.
- Overlord (2012) got a "YOU'RE IN THE GAME!!" rating, pointing out how tired the "trapped in video game world" plot is.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica got a "whaaatever" for the story, but the art design got an honest 5/5.
- The first episode of Queen's Blade got an animated GIF of a smiley face shooting itself in the head out of 5.
- R-15 got a GIF of a smiley head holding a gun to itself.
- Senran Kagura got "boobapalooza 2013" in lieu of a rating.
- The second season of Strike Witches got a "shrug?".
- Student Council's Discretion got an "it doesn't matter". The review consisted entirely of a picture of a bucket of fish as a metaphor for the show, and another of seals as a metaphor for the intended audience.
- Upotte!! got a Big "WHAT?!" and Your Head A-Splode picture in the middle of the review.
"Heh heh heh....... He Is the Weakest of the Four Heavenly Kings." I Was Dismissed From My Job, but Somehow I Became the Master of a Hero and a Priestess has one of these that could probably also count as "out of bounds" depending on how you see it. The magic orbs meant to measure potential glow and return a phrase. A properly prophesized Hero returns the phrase "Just what the hell are you?" which is considered the top of the scale. Level 1 ex-member of the Four Heavenly Kings Caspodia gets "Damn. Just damn." which is a result that has never happened before.
Jacob Hope Chapman aka JesuOtaku has become prone to these since he started working with ANN in preview guides, often for the same reasons as Bertschy.
- I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!! got a "GTFO" rating.
- Hamatora received an "oh my god I don't care" out of 5.
- Cross Ange got a "worthless" rating.
- Dies Irae got a screenshot of Indiana Jones saying "Nazis. I hate these guys."
The Pop Team Epic anime's pilot achieved the rare and dubious honor of getting this type of score from almost every ANN reviewer. Nick Creamer gave it a "Two middle fingers right the heck up there." Lynzee Loveridge gave it a "I think my brain is bleeding." James Beckett gave it a negative 5 out of 5, and said attempting to score it properly would be "an exercise in futility." Theron Martin gave it a "WTF." Jacob Chapman, true to form, rated it "╭∩╮('･ω･´)╭∩╮". Its only legitimate score was a 1.5/5 from Rebecca Silverman.

Fan Works

In Harry Potter and the Rune Stone Path, Harry's trying to express just how weird his life is:
Harry: On a scale of one to shadow panther I think we hit Giant Squid on that one.

Film

Dread Central reviewer Scott Foy's now trademark "FUCK THIS MOVIE" rating. Foy doesn’t use profanity often, so when one of his reviews contains the phrase (and now rating) “Fuck this movie” it means that the film in question is really bad.
Sue at Mutant Reviewers from Hell gave Grave of the Fireflies a rating of "GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!"
CHUD.com's infamous "Fuck You Out of 10" review of the Halloween (2007) remake.
Phelous, a reviewer of bad horror movies, described A Serbian Film as the worst thing he’s ever watched. And he's watched movies like Birdemic and Five Across the Eyes. Notable is the fact that he usually watches a movie for a review twice (once just to watch it, and again to take notes), but he was so disgusted with A Serbian Film that he refused to watch it again after the first viewing.
Spill.com (an online movie review site) gives a rating of "Fuck You" for movies they absolutely hated. They've got "Full Price!!", "Matinee!", "Rental", and "Some Bullshit!" as the other ratings instead of a numbered scale, but "Fuck You" is not in their regular rating scale. However, sometimes they find films so bad and offensive that they can't even give it "Some old bullshit", instead resorting to this. Often accompanied with a picture of Korey flipping the bird.
- Disaster Movie (2008) was the first movie they reviewed to earn this dubious honor.
- Vampires Suck. Spill's video reviews are usually 4–5 minutes long and have the profanity spoken by the reviewers censored. The review, including intro and outro, is only 44 seconds long, consisting only of a clip from the film, which then cuts to a disgusted Korey staring blankly at the camera for several seconds before issuing his "Fuck You" rating, which this time goes uncensored.

Live-Action TV

Conan O'Brien does this on occasion with his Clueless Gamer reviews. He usually starts by noting that he's the worst possible person to review games as the last game he was good at was Pong, and then ends with a completely nonsensical rating—and rating scale.
Conan: Out of an 88—an 88 being pretty good, a 110 being excellent, a 150 being awful, and a 3 being... not bad—I'd give this... a 26 C.
Victoria Jackson;s tenure on Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s shaded into this trope. Her rating scale was "4: Pretty good. 3: Best movie ever. 2: Worst movie ever. 1: Pretty good."

Music

Anthony Fantano typically rates albums and mixtapes on a 10 point scale — but if he really doesn't like an album, he refuses to assign it a number at all, and simply calls it NOT GOOD (complete with explosion SFX).
- Anthony also gave both G-Eazy's When It's Dark Out and Post Malone's August 26th Mixtape a rating of whitegirlturnupmusic/10 on separate occasions.
Pitchfork seems prone to this:
- They gave Jet’s Shine On the rating "video of a chimp drinking its own piss". After a site redesign, a 0.0 score is displayed; the video is posted where the review would be.
- Their rating of Radiohead’s In Rainbows seemed like this: instead of a score, there was an input box for users to submit scores (a reference to the band’s ‘pay what you feel like’ distribution method for this album), though upon entering a score, the editor’s score (9.3 out of 10) became visible. However, after a site redesign, only the reviewer’s score remains.
- They gave Do You Like Rock Music?, the second album by English rockers Sea Power, the rating of U2.
- They gave Meow The Jewels, the joke remix album of Run The Jewels 2 where all the beats were remade with cat sounds, a cat emoji with heart-shaped Wingding Eyes, likely meant as a positive rating.
Cokemachineglow's alleged review of Starflyer 59's Dial M (which began with the reviewer admitting that they could not objectively review the album, and immediately derailed into a rage-filled rant against Christian Rock) gave the album a score of "†%".
Terrorizer magazine gave Sunn O)))’s album Monoliths and Dimensions the rating O))). They actually intended this as a compliment, however, awarding it a glowing review.

Podcasts

Medium Popcorn has a four-star ratings scale: "Small", "Medium", "Large" and "Extra-Large". For those movies they deem unworthy of even a "Small", they have the rating of "Pile of Dog Shit" And they can (and do) add as many piles on to the rating as they feel, depending on how much the movie in question pissed them off. For example, co-host Justin Brown gave Good Burger (which he despised) thirty-six piles of dog shit ("Twelve bags of dog shit, with each bag containing three piles").

Tabletop Games

In Cyberpunk (RPG), Adam Smasher's in-game Empathy Stat is listed as "Yeah, right...".
In Pendragon, Sir Galahad's stat block simply reads "Galahad wins".
In Vampire: The Masquerade, Cain's stats are simply "You lose". Specifically, not only are his powers utterly broken due to him being the first vampire, but also because of the curse on him God will just strike down anything that tries to physically harm him anyway.

Video Games

In response to many publishers in the game industry abusing Metacritic and other review aggregate websites as a means of awarding "merit" based bonuses to developers, a lot of websites that review video games (Such as Kotaku, Ars Technica, and Joystiq) no longer give out a quantifiable score as an "Up Yours" to the industry.
TOM from Toonami liked Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag that he reviewed it before finishing it, and noted he doesn't want it to end. So he gave it a score of "ARRRRRRRR!"
Angry Joe's review of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is both this and still within bounds. He wishes he could give the game Kevin Spacey out of 10 before lamenting that that isn't a score on his scale and just giving it a 6/10
Paul Tassi of Forbes expressed a mixture of horror and admiration when reviewing Flappy Bird, questioning how a game so inherently pointless and lacking in content could become a major phenomenon. In light of its inexplicable fame and appeal, he rated it "Cthulhu/10".
Furcadia has a seasonal contest for minigames (called Dreams), and one well-known creator—known as Graphite—experienced a variation of this (as his creations were contest entries, there were no ratings beyond First Place, Second Place, Third Place, etc.).
Graphite was sure his creation ColdFusion (essentially a game of Atomica built on the Furcadia platform) would win because his creation was so innovative and different. He took patching (adding special graphics) and skinning (altering the appearance of the game interface itself), and DragonSpeak (scripting) to such an extreme that his game didn't resemble ''Furcadia'' at all.
Unfortunately, this meant the judges had no idea how to rank it, and so placed it in a category all its own. To quote Graphite, "This dream was in fact so innovative that the judges decided to create a special category for my dream alone in which I ended up getting first place, last place, and every place in-between."
The judges did agree that the dream was So Cool, It's Awesome, gave it a glowing review, and awarded Graphite handsomely for essentially taking DragonSpeak and Patching and creating something that didn’t resemble Furcadia at all in either appearance or gameplay. To quote Felorin (Co-Founder of Furcadia), "This dream is going to receive a special Puzzling, Mind-boggling, Patching and DragonSpeak Mastering Trickster award of Triwings for Life and a dozen Purple Roses. (Whew that’s a mouthful!)"
Sadly, every update made to Furcadia since then makes the dream less and less compatible, leaving it virtually unplayable now.
After explaining why Giant Bomb wouldn't be able to formally review Fallout 76, Jeff Gerstmann informally rated it "fucking don't play this game".
A YouTube user Graeldon is reviewing every game on Steam in alphabetical order in the series "Steam Sequence." Every review is concluded with a rating out of 10, and all of them are meaningless.
A variant in The Grimoire of Marisa, wherein Marisa rates and offers her opinions on some of the many spellcards in the series. Marisa’s rating scale itself is fairly normal, giving the spellcard a certain number of stars based on her perceived difficulty of "Referencing" the spell. However, she sometimes breaks the “difficulty level" boundary and rates some by "Show-Off Level," "Temperature," "Believability," "Volume," and "Whimsicalness."
JonTron's "Game Reviews?" hand out scores that do not make sense at all, such as an A out of 5 for Sonic Colors and 6 Golden Bananas+ out of Shigeru Miyamoto for Donkey Kong Country Returns.
Sure, the rating scale of ScrewAttack’s VGR show is pretty idiosyncratic in itself (“Buy It”, “Rent It” and “F It”), but they still do occasionally play with the scale for certain games. For example, Modern Warfare 2 was given a “rent it, just never return it” in protest of Activision’s infamous price hike they demanded for that game.
The highly divisive Shmup Space Giraffe received what The Other Wiki describes as an "unusual" rating of "Holy crap this is awesome hell yes/10" from a review on Angry Gamer.
This review of Tattoo Assassins. At the end, in a scale of 1 to 10 it rates it with a picture of A.C. Current farting.
Tavern Talk: In the good ending of "Hey There Evelynn!", Zephir aka Blaze tells Melli about his quest at Marrow Castle, and she asks him how scary the castle is.
Melli: On a scale from one to parents being eaten by a T. rex, how scary was it?
Blaze: ... In the middle... I suppose?
Top Ten FTW's Top 10 Most Difficult Games introduced a Frustration Index Meter that gave mostly nonsensical scores like "Balls deep in that ass" and "Double Obama Teriyaki"
During his stint at Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewing horrible games, Seanbaby once gave a Trolls game a score of "a picture of a Troll riding a Hotdog."
The closest thing Yahtzee, the host of Zero Punctuation, gave to a numerical value was one of these. In his 2019 Games I Haven't Reviewed Roundup, his final score for Terminator: Resistance was Fine out of 10.
In-Universe in Undertale. Checking Temmie reveals that, instead of having ATK and DEF scores, she's just "RATED TEM OUTTA TEM". The Mad Dummy also breaks the scale by having a DEF score of "YES".

Web Original

In his review of 3, 2, 1, Smurf!, Caddicarus jokes that the game "was also one of the only games in the world that Official UK PlayStation Magazine'' gave a "FUCK OFF AND DIE" out of ten". (They actually gave it a 1/10.)
- Caddicarus himself sometimes employed the "out of bounds" method, as one of his gimmicks is whether he "slaughters" the game for being bad, or "salvages" it for being good. On occasion, the game has been in-between, thus getting a "slauvage".
Stuart Ashen's guest Jon Blyth said "If you want me to give it a score, then I give Renegade III this noise: (back-of-throat gurgle/scream noise)".
- Similarly, Stuart's final summary of a selection of games for the Tiger Game.com is as follows, "In Conclusion: (smash cut to Stuart curled up in a corner, holding his face, screaming)"
On The Book Was Better, Krimson Rogue gave both The Twilight Saga and Fifty Shades of Grey a Fuck You!/5, because a 1/5 was too much.
Chadtronic has a series dubbed Cursed Commercials where he rates how "cursed" certain television ads are. Some of the ratings that he gives to the commercials reflect the ads themselves.
- In Cursed Commercials #1, he gives the "Dr. Amigo" commercial a "bootleg out of ten."
- In Cursed Commercials #3, Chad rates the "Fushigi" ad a "scam out of ten."
Normally, Every Garfield Comic, a Twitter gimmick account reviewing every Jon and Garfield comic in chronological order, would rate the strips in a standard 1-10 scale. When reviewing the Jon comic for March 25, 1976, however, it's considered so baffling that it was given a rating of "🤡/10". Likewise, the May 27, 1976 comic was given a "❓/10" rating. June 10, 1976 gets no other comment than "This gif / 10", the GIF in question taken from an infamous NRJ Mobile advertisement. Meanwhile, the June 24, 1976 comic gets a "😾/10", the July 8, 1976 comic gets a "💯/10", the September 2, 1976 just gets a "/10", the October 7, 1976 comic gets a "💩/10", the October 28, 1976 comic gets a "🤯/10", the January 13, 1977 comic gets a "😞/10", the February 17, 1977 comic gets a "🐝/10", the March 3, 1977 comic gets an "😮/10", and the March 10, 1977 comic gets an "🏅/10". As for "0/10" ratings, the Jon comics for April 22, 1976 ("because I have no fucking clue what to make of this"), December 30, 1976 and February 24, 1977 got them.
Youtuber Jauwn gave the crypto game MetaDOS a score of war crime/10.
Kimi Sparkle (a parody of MLP Analysis videos, from one of the creators of Friendship is Witchcraft) normally rates episodes on a scale of one to five stars. When reviewing "Castle Mane-ia", she hates it so much that she wants to give it zero stars, but she can't because that would just be an empty screen. So she awards it one rock instead.
The Music Video Show had this in Episode 95. Near the end of each episode, the host sums up her feelings towards the video with Final Thoughts. In this episode, it is part of a Robot Chicken sketch involving a man throwing himself out a window, followed by a black screen with the words "AND THAT'S HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER" with the ending theme from Are You Afraid of the Dark?.
"Horribifuckus", courtesy of The Nostalgia Critic.
- He also declared Batman & Robin (1997) ("BAT-CREDIT CARD????!!!!!") to be "Supercrapafuckerifficexpialibullshit." In song.
- Out-of-character, Doug Walker said that "despise" is too little to describe his feelings for The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and that the word for his hatred "probably doesn't even exist".
Rank10YGO:
- Ojamas were graded on every scale to be an Ojama King/3. He acknowledged that if the deck were to be graded conventionally as a single archetype, it would probably be named average at best at every grade - but as the deck is more of an unusual engine of highly variable synergy and quality rather than a conventional archetype, this wouldn't really work.
"You can't grade Ojamas. They're like an engine, if the engine was a double-A battery powering up the entire USS Enterprise... Ojamas are actually decently consistent, but it's like having a lifetime supply of bootleg game consoles. No matter how many of them there are and no matter how much they try to convince you, that's not a Playstation and there is no such game as Super Mario Bros 16."
- Similarly, Kaijus got a Minilla/5 on every scale, for about the same reason - dedicated "pure" kaiju builds are almost impossible and the deck is far more useful as a removal engine in something else, making traditional grades much less applicable.
- Frogs got a descriptive rating of Good Water Engine/5 because, again, the deck is almost never played "pure" and works mainly as an engine in other Water-based decks.
- When looking at the Signer Dragons, he was unsure how to rate the banned Ancient Fairy Dragon on the video's scale of one to five D's, ultimately settling on "Banned D's out of 5?"
- He simply gave joke ratings to Triamids (Carolinian Dirt Mountain/5), Chemicritters (Carbon Monoxide Poisoning/5), and Digital Bugs (Digital Shrug/5), as due to their small scale and lack of support, as well as external elements, it's very difficult to make a "pure" build of any of them in the standard game.
- The Entities are outright impossible to grade as an archetype as they didn't have enough cards to make up a coherent deck of their own, hence Rata's grading scores are random items at random points on the scale.
- In the re-review of Genex, the archetype was deemed impossible to grade as their current playstyle is as a Synchro spam engine whose output depends on whether your opponent can remove Repaired Genex Controller and what generic Synchros you make (though they do get vague comments on the scale suggesting roughly where they fall in each category). However, the fact that they even qualified to be graded on the five-point scale is a huge improvement compared to their first showing.
ToughPigs did an article where correspondent Beth Cook recreated summer-friendly foods from Fraggle Rock and its streaming reboot, judging them on a scale of up to five radishes (since that scale is used throughout the article, it's kept from being a Meaningless Comparison). The last one is the Radish Shake from two Back to the Rock episodes, which turned out so disgusting that it got scores of "nope" for taste, "meh" for ease, and "why" for blending in with Silly Creature culture.
In Something Awful's ROM Pit, games are normally rated from zero to negative fifty. The game Werewolf: The Last Warrior, however, was simply rated "FUCK MEeeeeeee".
In the What If? entry "Twitter timeline height", Randall Monroe has an analogy involving twenty-seven The Land Before Time sequels, and illustrates this with a list of their star ratings. Most of them don't seem to be very good, but a number have odd ways of displaying it like "half a star, but not the first one", "the bottom halves of all the stars" and so on. Conversely, The Land Before Time XXVI somehow goes Out Of Bounds and scores five stars out of four.
Played with for Steam game reviewer Graeldon on YouTube. During most of his reviews, particularly those in his sequential series, his final rating would be "(insert an object/feature from the game in question)/10", before explaining it as an analogy for his actual verdict in a thumbs up/down fashion.

Other

Asexuals receive an X on the Kinsey Scale.

Impossible to Rate ("What.")

Anime and Manga

Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network gave the first episode of Upotte!! a rating of “WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT”.
Jacob Chapman rated Prison School "???".
Apparently the first episode of Pop Team Epic broke everybody on ANN, with the majority of the scores being this.

Fan Works

Rage Reviews (a review group on Fimfiction.net) normally grades fanfics on a scale of 0% to 100% Rage. For stories that exist on a completely different axis, they have a few other scores: "??%" for stories that are too confusing to inspire rage, "MEH" for stories that are too boring to get angry over, and "SAD" for stories that just make the reviewer feel sorry for the author.

Comic Books

Paul O’Brien of The X-Axis picked up Quantum and Woody #32, on the assumption that a relaunch of a title, which had as its gimmick that stuff had happened in all the unpublished issues since the cancellation, would be a great out-of-context jumping-on point. He was wrong, and rated it n/a, on the basis that he simply couldn’t judge what someone who knew what the hell was going on might get out of it.

Film

Animal House features this, when Dean Wormer dresses down the group for their terrible grades. Though most of them get C's at most, and D's and F's more frequently, D-Day's grade isn't applicable - he hasn't done enough work to be counted as having completed a single course.

Live-Action TV

MythBusters (see above) once had a myth fail to yield useful results—the Supersize JATO Rocket Car, because the rocket car blew up before it could launch off the ramp. Adam decided to call this myth "Appropriately Supersized".

Music

This review of Toby Keith's "American Ride", in which he is so baffled by the song (he can't seem to pinpoint whether it's an Indecisive Parody, So Bad, It's Good, or a Mind Screw), ending his review in "I'm afraid the 'Ride' has just left me stranded too deeply in WTF-limbo to render a verdict." He eschews the site's A-to-F rating scale to give the song a rating of "AMERICA!… I mean, N/A."
Mixed with Meaningless Comparison in Jon Savage's review of Nurse with Wound's 1979 LP Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella for Sounds magazine, in which he gave the album "????? out of five" instead of the usual five stars (he couldn't decide whether it was "pure genius" or "sheer nonsense").
Similarly, Pitchfork's review of Relaxation of the Asshole, a bizarre comedy album by Guided by Voices singer Robert Pollard, gave it both a 0.0 and a 10.0 (the current version of the site just displays the 0.0 though).
- They also gave Garth Brooks Chris Gaines album a ?? out of 10.
Pascal Wyse's review of William Shatner's 2004 spoken-word album Has Been in The Guardian, in which he eschewed the paper's normal 1- to 5-star scale, instead calling it "beyond the star system".
This CD is beyond good or bad. It is from a world where concepts such as "unique" and "indispensible" [sic] live happily alongside "hilariously, brain-tearingly wrong".
Johnny "Guitar" Watson's 1954 instrumental "Space Guitar" was so out-there for its time that the Billboard magazine could only rate it a "??" out of 100.
In the 2020 Quarter Three FIMI video, Crash Thompson reacted to Will Wood's The Normal Album with a bewildered look, a tilted head, and a very confused "Huh?" And "Huh?/5" was the rating it got.

Professional Wrestling

411Mania reviewer Larry Csonka admitted he had no idea what rating to give the 2020 Money In The Bank ladder match(es)^note, although he said he enjoyed it overall.
On a recap of WWE Raw on Bleacher Report, the segment of Lana and Bobby Lashley's marriage puzzled the writer so much that he gave it a "Grade: WTF".

Video Games

Equestria Gaming has handed out “Ungradeable—??/10” ratings on occasion.
Lore-wise, this is what the EX rank in the Fate Series amounts to: EX is reserved for parameters that cannot be calculated with the usual E- to A+ system. In those cases, such parameters usually cannot be quantified because they are dependant on external factors or are just outright absurd: for example Jeanne D'Arc has EX rank Magic Resistance not because she is really strong against magic, but because somehow it never hits her so trying to rate it is moot. Or Odysseus has EX Luck because his luck in The Odyssey can only be described as "wtf" (he keeps getting into horrible situations yet somehow always escapes unscathed). This does not apply to the gameplay, (especially not in Fate/Grand Order) as numbers-wise EX always gives servants the highest rankings.
- In Fate/Grand Order, aside from the EX rankings, there are also occasions when there straight-up isn't any ranking, not even EX. The Skill "Primordial Rune" never has a rank, and Edmond Dantes' Luck has no rank to speak of (it's implied in his case that he never leaves anything to luck).
NGamer gave ??% to Bakushow (aka LOL), on the grounds that its score depends entirely on what the player makes of it.
- WarioWare: D.I.Y. got 100%, as the game itself is one of making games. The thinking was that NGamer made all the games, and NGamer is infallible. Therefore, NGamer’s games must be perfect.
- On separate occasions under its previous names (NGC Magazine and N64 Magazine), it awarded scores of ??% to two Japan-only games that they found completely unable to comprehend- GiFTPiA on the Gamecube (which they suspected was probably really good) and Get A Love: Panda Love Unit on the Nintendo 64 (with the mini-review reading "Impenetrable Japanese girlfriend simulator. No, hang on, That Came Out Wrong.")
- It also gave a DS entry in the Cabela hunting series ":(" and Mizuiro Blood "???".
- Similarly, the UK Nintendo Official Magazine gave a blank space where the percentage score traditionally was for Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution. The review essentially degenerated into a series of screenshots of humorous quotes sent to random online opponents.
PC Gamer UK once gave a terrible University management game XX% and the review was written as a multiple choice exam so the reader could choose the final score. The highest possible was no more than 10% and the lowest was a flat 0.
Smogon placed the Pokémon Darmanitan Zen Mode in an "untiered" position for quite some time, due to the difficulty in how to place it: it's essentially a transformation of Darmanitan that can only activate mid-battle, and it's generally agreed to make its user worse rather than better. Later on, when more Pokémon with transformation abilities were introduced, it was decided that it should just get the same tier as regular Darmanitan and be treated as an ability instead.
Video game magazine Zzap64! already did this in 1987 when they reviewed Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit. This is mainly due to the fact that they thought that the game's quality depends on the things that you make with it. They said however that the game is a great tool to make shoot 'em ups with which is why they awarded it a gold medal. This has probably made this trope Older Than They Think.
In a case of it being this trope or Readings Are Off the Scale, Symposium of Post-mysticism’s author Akyuu gives ratings for friendliness and power. Unlike Perfect Memento in Strict Sense, which had definite ratings, she actually gives out “Unknown” ratings for when she cannot define the character. Reiuji Utsuho is a unique case: both areas are rated as “Unknown”.
Toonami:
- When TOM reviewed Dropship: United Peace Force for the PlayStation 2 the game received a “?” rating. Tom had no idea how to rate the game since he could never get past the sixth level. This was accompanied by repeated footage of TOM losing on that level. (And per the guy in charge of Toonami, to this day, they still haven't beaten it.)
- Post-revival, when reviewing Slender, TOM couldn’t decide what score to give it due to his utter terror (though he did like it).
Transistor: The Jump Ratings, after Perfect, breaks the algorithm: "Rating Algorithm: ?".

Web Video

DEATH BATTLE!:
- Archie Sonic vs Wally West had combatants so ridiculously fast, whose speed feats defied so many laws of physics that, ironically, it became the least important of their battle and was considered infinite for all purposes. Wally manages to win due to having more tricks that could counter what Sonic could threw at him than the opposite.
- "Simon the Digger Vs. Kyle Rayner" was a difficult fight to rate due to the fact that both combatants are essentially the most busted Reality Warpers in anime or comics. Comparisons of speed and strength are meaningless when both combatants can fly faster than the concept of speed, strike at infinite locations without ever missing, or manipulate space and time on a multiversal scale. For this battle, a new set of standards were needed to determine who would win: imagination, willpower, and potential. Kyle would seem to have an edge in imagination, being a former comic book artist who used the Green Lantern ring in very creative ways compared to Simon simply conjuring drills for every situation; although Simon could tank everything Kyle threw at him by absorbing the energy thrown at him. As for willpower: Simon absorbed an 11-dimensional Multiversal Labyrinth, which is less than Kyle's ability to exert his power over 12.3 dimensions, giving Kyle a stronger base-level metric for his willpower. The deciding factor is potential: Spiral Energy's core concept is the fact that it is infinite power fueled by sheer human potential, which can straight-up reject the death and destruction of its wielder by allowing them to regenerate their bodies at the informational level. Kyle never achieved such a feat, which — combined with the 24-hour time limit of Lantern Corps rings before needing to be recharged and Kyle's inability to properly harness the strongest thing in the DC universe, the Life Equation — meant that Simon's potential, and by extention, his willpower, were greater than Kyle's, giving him the decisive advantage.
The Hardcore Kid gives works a rating of "Hardcore Hit" if he likes them, and "Hardcore Headache" if he doesn't. Marvin Marvin got a "Hardcore Tumor" because of how reprehensible he found it, and Bagi, the Monster of Mighty Nature a "Hardcore Catflap" because it was such a Mind Screw to him.
TierZoo couldn't rank the players of the very, very weird Abyssal Server because nobody has any real knowledge of it aside from a few screenshots and twitch clips—just enough to make it clear that the server is completely different from any other. (In other words, he couldn't rank the animals of the ocean floor because scientists have very little information about it and the conditions are incomparable to anything on land.)

Web Original

Seanbaby's Superfriends page had this reaction to Lex Luthor, as Seanbaby couldn't figure out how to rate the guy. In terms of his actual strength, he was just a bald guy with some gadgets going up against some of the most overpowered characters in Western fiction. But on the other hand, the fact that he was able to corral and order the Legion of Doom and give the Superfriends as much trouble as he did suggested him to be an absolutely brilliant leader and brave beyond belief. Eventually, Seanbaby gave him a rating of "1-8?", surmising that if nothing else, Lex had some huge balls.

Other

The aforementioned Dark Bunny sauces also has Bunny's Garden 2016 and Bunny's Cupboard, each with a heat rating of ?/10; while Rabbit's Rub and Heffalump are listed as variable.

Refusal to Rate ("Scores don't apply here.")

Anime and Manga

Zac Bertschy refused to rate the anime adaptation of Bunny Drop (the space where the rating would go reads "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ENDING", somewhat crossing over with a Meaningless Value rating), as Zac couldn't get over the creepiness of the source material's ending where the adoptive father/daughter duo marry each other, but still held out hope that the anime would end differently, as he thought the story was enjoyable up until that point. The anime does end differently - it concludes its story right before it would have reached the manga's Time Skip.

Comic Books

On Atop the Fourth Wall, Linkara has a video of "Top 15 Comics I'll Never Review." He has various reasons—some viewer suggestions he actually likes, he won't review porn, etc.—but some, like One More Day, fall into the category of rage-inducingly bad. He eventually did it anyway.
The X-Axis again: Paul didn’t give a rating to the 2004 relaunch of X-Force, holding that judging its quality by any normal standard was beside the point—it was exactly what you’d expect a relaunch of X-Force by Rob Liefeld to be like and therefore, presumably, the people who bought it did so because that’s what they wanted (whether to make fun of it or because they were genuinely fans of the Rob Liefeld style).

Film

On a positive note, the website 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting does not give star reviews to movies that either predate the concept of filmmaking (Georges Méliès' "stunt films") or are not in any state to be objectively reviewed (the stills-based reconstruction of the famed lost London After Midnight). These films are still reviewed, but their rating is "Not Applicable".
- A more straightforward example: The film Roar (Tippi Hedren, her family, and several dozen untrained lions) got a "?!?!?!".
  El Santo: What makes Roar such astonishing viewing — and what ultimately forced me to invent a brand new rating just for it — is the stark divergence between the movie that Marshall and Hedren set out to shoot and the one that actually emerged from their efforts. What was supposed to be a treacly, Disneyish family adventure flick, with an uplifting moral about humans living in harmony with nature, came out instead as the most authentically terrifying animal attack picture I’ve ever seen. They thought they were making Grizzly Adams, but they came within an ace of making Grizzly Man.
DVD Talk gave the Fox Cinema Archive's Pan and Scan DVDs zero stars in all categories, and automatic "Skip It" advice, with the reviewer insisting that no good reason exists in The New '10s for a widescreen movie to have its picture cropped to 4:3.
Roger Ebert did this occasionally:
- He refused to give a star rating to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls not for quality or content reasons, but because he wrote the screenplay and could not be objective. In place of a review is a reprint of a 1980 essay he wrote for Film Comment about the development of the film.
- In his review of The Human Centipede, which he disclaimed as not being "so much a review as a public service announcement," he was more explicit in his refusal.
- From his review of Pink Flamingos:
  Ebert: Note: I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.
James Rolfe attracted some minor backlash from fans of Ghostbusters (2016) when he, an avid and vocal fan of the Ghostbusters franchise, issued his "no review" and simply refused to watch or support it, and by extension and in the interest of fairness, refused to give it a rating. His "review" of it instead consists of him matter-of-factly explaining how people should "rate" it by voting with their wallets, admitting he's too biased and attached to the original films to give it a fair rating as he felt it would taint his memories of the original films, and simply criticising the trailers for their jokes and special effects and the title itself for simply using the name of the original film instead of having a subtitle as if it's trying to replace the original.
James Rolfe: Instead of a review, for once, I'm doing something a little different: a non-review. Because I refuse to watch it. Judging from the trailers, it looks awful. So, instead of doing what everybody else is gonna do — go see the movie and then talk about how bad it is — I'm going to do something different. Something unheard of. I'm not gonna see it! Wow, what a novel concept, right? If you already know you're gonna hate it, why give them your money? If this is the Ghostbusters movie no one wanted, then the box office results should reflect that.
The only film currently without a star rating in The Editing Room is Gooby; and that particular script needs to be read to be believed. This might be more a case of Impossible to Rate, however.
Unshaved Mouse's review of Saving Mr. Banks ends with him withholding a score to the "piece of corporate propaganda".
There was a review of one of The Toxic Avenger movies that rated it "Stars? Who needs stars?"

Literature

ARamone, who reviews on The Arched Doorway, once refused to rate a book she hadn't finished; the closest she got was saying she wouldn't recommend it.
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books has a grade of "DNF", for books they Did Not Finish.

Live-Action TV

Chuck Sonnenburg of SF Debris has done this with a couple of his Star Trek reviews.
- The TNG episode "Family" was a good natured case. While Chuck liked the episode, he refused to rate it because, as he put it, the episode consisted entirely of plot threads which in other episodes would've been B plots.
- He also did this for Doctor Who's "Vincent and the Doctor", for the same reason — he could not compare it to other episodes for rating, when it is so different to them.
- He also skipped out on ranting the Voyager episode, "11:59", for a similar reason, saying that he found it to be too much unlike Trek for him to make a qualified judgement on it.
- Another Voyager episode, "Mortal Coil", also went unrated, though for a somewhat less good natured reason. Chuck felt that the episode relied heavily on the viewer, if not outright liking, then at least having some sympathy for Neelix's character. In the summary, he admitted up front that he simply despises Neelix too much for that to ever happen, so he recused himself from rating the episode, explaining that he simply felt incapable of giving it a fair shake.

Music

Crash Thompson refused to review or rate Goodness, Gracious by Back Up Kid on the grounds that this was basically a basement recording by a hobbyist rather than a professional recording by a professional artist or musician. He then demanded his viewers consider how they'd feel if such meagre efforts of their own were held up to scrutiny. Thompson continued by stating that he did enjoy the recording, and encouraged Back Up Kid to keep making music.
The Rap Critic refused to give a grade to "Loyal" by Chris Brown because "it would validate him as a rapper".
In Anthony Fantano's review of Yung Lean's Unknown Death 2002 mixtape... Anthony doesn't review the mixtape at all, instead chanting "my hands are bread" repeatedly.
- A more sincere version happened in his review of Taylor Swift's Fearless (Taylor's Version). The review was done with the full knowledge that the re-recorded album was done less for artistic purposes and more as a personal act of defiance against her former label.^ExplanationIn short, following her departure, the label adamantly denied her the rights to her own music released through them, prompting her decision to re-record said music and ensure personal ownership of the newer versions Because of this, in lieu of giving it a number rating as if it were solely about the music, Anthony rated it with "Screw your old record label. Do what you wanna do. Cool?"
  - Another more serious instance of this occured for his review of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD. While stating he finds it to be the band's best release since their haitus in the 2000s, he gives the album a "NO SCORE AS OF 10 OCTOBER 2024 42,010 DEAD" due to the album's primary focus of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
This review of the Massive Multiplayer Crossover single "Forever Country" by the blog Saving Country Music gives an N/A out of N/A rating because he simply felt that it was more of a product than a song, and not worth his time.
Deconstructed and Played for Drama for Drowned in Sound's review of Mount Eerie's "A Crow Looked at Me". The justification is that it's such a personal album, about the death of Phil Elverum's wife, that even giving a score feels rude and disingenuous.
- Spectrum Pulse refused to give Mount Eerie's "A Crow Looked At Me" a rating because it was a too raw and personal record for him to give it a score.
James Wolcott’s review of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
"What's most distressing is the possibility that Metal Machine Music isn’t so much a knife slash at his detractors as perhaps a blade turned inward. At its very worst this album suggests masochism. He may be, to shift weaponry images, moving to the center of fire so that we critics-as-assassins can make a clean kill. Fine, Lou, go ahead. Just stand there. Don't move, But [sic] damned if I'll squeeze the trigger."

Professional Wrestling

411mania does not give ratings to Squash Matches.
Cagematch, a German website allowing users to rate matches from one to ten, does not allow users to do so to matches that last less than five minutes.
Scott Keith does not rate midget matches, battle royals (but he does rate the Royal Rumble matches) or matches of only a few seconds' duration.
Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter writes recaps of lesser shows (most episodes of weekly TV shows from the major North American promotions, buildup shows from major Japanese promotions as well as most cards from minor promotions all over the world) that do not display ratings for matches that are less than 3-and-a-half stars. Dave also doesn't rate edited and reshot "cinematic wrestling" (and not just gimmick-fueled extravaganzas featuring the likes of Bray Wyatt either as he didn't rate "The Greatest Match Ever", a straightforward showdown between Randy Orton and Edge that he would've awarded five stars had it been done in "one take").

Tabletop Games

rpg.net writer Shannon Appelcline made a list of "The Top 10 Infamous RPGs", which did not include the games referred to as "The Vile Trio":
Three games nowadays tend to placed at the top of lists of infamous RPGs: Racial Holy War (2001), FATAL (2002), and HYBRID (2006). None of them were professionally published, and none them seem to have been created in good faith as actual RPGs, so they aren't included in this list. (They're also not deserving of any attention.)
The writer of the tier system for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e originally refused to give the truenamer class a rating—due to poorly-written formulas, after the first few levels it can’t use its powers at all without extremely heavy Min-Maxing, and even then it’s a Squishy Wizard with worse spells than some Magic Knight classes. This was worse than a mere Low-Tier Letdown — it was a class that fundamentally didn't function. He would later say that a truenamer that has pushed themselves enough to use their powers regularly is in Tier 4 (about as good as a warlock or rogue), while a truenamer that hasn't is Tier 6 (the same as Joke Characters like the commoner and infamous trainwrecks like the samurai and divine mind).
In Dungeon Dudes' ranking of spells for Dungeons & Dragons 5e book Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, they refused to give "Dream of the Blue Veil" a ranking as it was entirely a plot device.

Video Games

In place of verbally receiving its 1, or any verbal review at all, Alex Navarro's video review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing ends with him turning his back on his desk, walking out to the street, lying down on it, and shaking his head.
In SomecallmeJohnny, Johnny chose not to give Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing a score.
Johnny: We're not going to give it a score, it doesn't deserve one.
The Completionist: Jirard occasionally declines to give official ratings in circumstances when he's either close personal friends with the developers or has otherwise been involved behind-the-scenes, as he feels that he is just too biased in the game's favor for his ranking to be valid. (He'll still give unoffical ratings, though.) He's done this with Shovel Knight spinoffs Pocket Dungeon and Dig, and WrestleQuest. However, he considered Sea of Stars so good that he excitedly encouraged viewers to "Complete it!" (his highest rating, that it's worth it to pursue 100% Completion) despite acknowledging his bias.
Kill Screen's review of Duke Nukem Forever probably stands as the most extreme example of this; not only did the reviewer refuse to give a score, the entire site decided not to give out scores ever again.
"We didn't think it would be possible for a single terrible game to change our entire scoring system. Congratulations, Duke, you've broken us."
Giant Bomb refused to publish a review score for Fallout 76 at launch because none of their staff could stand to play the game long enough to properly review it.
Again from The Grimoire of Marisa: Marisa outright refuses to rate the spellcards of Suika and Medicine. Suika because all but one of her moves aren’t even danmaku (her being a fighting game boss who uses brute force), and Medicine because her body can't handle using poison.
When Kevvl, mentioned above, perfect-ran Duff McWhalen's stage in Mega Man X5, he refused to give Duff McWhalen a difficulty rating because, after an entire stage consisting of a very long, multi-phase fight with a miniboss, Duff McWhalen himself is incredibly easy. Instead, the U-555 (the stage's miniboss) gets the rating, and it's a 10/10.
- Likewise, when he covered the intro stage of Mega Man X3, the stage’s boss didn’t get the rating. Rather, the rating went to Mac, the stage’s miniboss, as he found it extremely difficult to avoid the traitorous Reploid’s opening attack.
When NGamer reviewed the infamous witch-touching game Doki Doki Majo Shinpan!, the rating for each category simply said "NO". It was even awarded the "Superman 64 Award For Worst Game (of 2007)". In a similar vein, they gave a game based around hunting wild animals a :( score, saying that "We haven't felt this depressed in a long time."
In response to the technical issues involving the Always-On DRM and the disastrous launch, Jonathan Cresswell's "review" of the 2013 SimCity is nothing more than a fake loading screen and "Estimated load time: <random number> minutes."
- YouTube game reviewer ProJared did something similar in his One-Minute Review of the game. He just showed himself struggling to get into the game, gave up 10 seconds into the review, and just ended it with the line, "F*** it, I'm going to bed," cutting to a black screen for the rest of the one-minute video.
Polygon's "review" for Star Fox Zero has their reviewer being so aggravated with the game that he not only refused to complete it (thus not giving it a score), but also insisted that he hadn't actually made a review of the game.
This isn't a review of Star Fox Zero. Save for very rare, extreme circumstances, Polygon reviews require that a game be completed, or at least a good-faith effort be made to complete it. I am not playing any more Star Fox Zero.
Played for Laughs by Jim Sterling's "100% objective review" of Final Fantasy XIII. The "review" consists of Sterling rattling off things about the game that are technically true, but give no opinion on the actual content, such as "Final Fantasy XIII is a video game." It was made as a Take That! to people who attacked negative reviews for not being "objective." Sterling would later say that a review is, by its nature, the reviewer's opinion, declaring the complaints meaningless.
- Played straight in Sterling's review of Velvet Assassin, where the game is so horrible they couldn't finish it and gave it an 'N/A' score.
- Was also played straight in Sterling’s review of Knight's Contract, where they stated that while they couldn't give it a score because they did not finish it, they assured readers that "it would not get a ten out of ten".
Tomcat Alley, an FMV flight simulator on the Sega CD, was given no score on a scale from 0–100 by a magazine called Interface ("TA claims to be an 'interactive movie' and not something as lowly as a mere videogame. And since our business is games it gets no score. No arms, no cookies!").
Although Video Game Critic typically grades on a standard A to F scale, he will occasionally give a game an 'NA' (ostensibly for 'Not Applicable'.) This is typically for one of three reasons: either the game is simply an enhanced remake of another one, an unfinished prototype, or it's meant for preschoolers and thus it would be slightly unfair for him to give it a grade.
Jonathan Wojcik's Pokémon reviews are generally given some sort of rating (see elsewhere on this page for when he gave some Pokemon a 'six out of five' or a 'moldy, festering Lucario skull out of five') but when he reached Goodra, he found that his feelings were too split (by his love of what the Pokémon represents but also his desire for what Goomy and Sliggoo seemed to be leading up to^noteOn multiple occasions leading up to this, Wojcik expressed a desire to see a fully troglobytic final evolution, and Sliggoo's eyes are stated to be slowly degrading, leading it to rely on other senses) to give it a good or a bad rating, but also too strong to give it a neutral one.
For the first time, I'm not going to rate a Pokémon at all. I don't want to give Goodra a "bad" rating, because at the end of the day it's still a dragon type slug with green slime dribbling off it, but neither can I bring myself to give it a good one. Not after a betrayal this unspeakable.
- In Wojcik's Digimon reviews, the coverage for Nanimon ends as follows:
  It's just ... it's godless. I'm not religious, that's just the only thing that this is. Godless.
  RATING: NO GOD
- The Wind Spirit line got ratings of "Ew", "Nah", and "??!!?!??!???!????????", as they were generally decent (or at least interesting) designs, but they were incredibly skeevy as the Henshin Hero forms of a character meant to be eleven.
X-Play required any game they reviewed to receive a rating of 1 to 5 stars. Any other rating was not allowed, so games that the hosts felt didn't deserve even 1 star were never given a review.
- The hosts refused to rate Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing because giving it 1 star would imply that it was actually a game. Other games featured in the 'games you should never buy' segment, such as Barbie Horse Adventure or Flags (a 'flag waving in the wind' simulator), also were not rated.
- X-Play gave Pokémon Channel a 1 out of 5, but they later said it should've been left unscored since it too wasn't technically a game.

Web Original

Blogger Beware's retrospective on the original Goosebumps books lists the ten best and worst books. In the latter category, Chicken Chicken (a book he found to be absolutely horrible) ranks #0, with this paragraph accompanying it:
"This book doesn't deserve a number. It doesn't even deserve to be listed. To list it implies some value, even as a marker for the lows of the series. But this book doesn't deserve the attention it will garner just by virtue of its position. This isn't a case of 'So bad it's good,' this is 'So bad I want to vomit[...]'. Chicken Chicken very nearly ended the blog two years ago, but I ultimately decided to push forward. I don't know what else to say except it really is that bad'."
As mentioned above in Out of Bounds, Fasion Photo Ruview is a web series in which RuPaul's Drag Race alumni Raja and Raven give their opinions on various fashion outfits, usually looks from Drag Race but also sometimes actual runways or drag queen's social media posts. The only time they have outright refused to rate a look was Joy Villa's "Make America Great Again" dress from the 2017 Grammys, deciding that even giving it hate with a rating would only give the look more publicity and infamy that she was looking for by wearing it. It did cause Raja to retroactively give a Toot (a good rating) to a look she had previously Booted, deciding "anything is better than this dress".
Josh Strife Hayes' Worst MMO Ever? series usually has him give each MMO a score out of 10, with that score being a humerous statement tangentially related to the overall game experience; for example, Eldevin got a Fine/10 and Neverwinter got a saddened This Review Score will Cost You 3500 Zen/10. But Isekai: Demon Waifu was such a rancid, genuinely misogynistic piece of software that he refused to rate it on the grounds he never wanted to see or think about the game again.
During his usual Mother's Basement "Hottest Trash" reviews, Geoff normally rates the series he selects for the videos a rating from 1 to 5 based on how trashy (read: not "bad") he thinks they will be. On a few occasions, he's refused to assign trash ratings:
- When it came time to rate the anime of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer in the Summer 2022 episode, Geoff refused to assign it a score, instead giving it "the bullet" because he loves all of Satoshi Mizukami's works and was so appalled by the low quality of Biscuit Hammer's animated adaptation that it didn't feel it qualified as comparable to his usual trash.
- Fall 2025's "Hottest Trash" episode also saw no trash rating for Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle because Geoff went into watching the show expecting it to be trashy but wound up unironically enjoying it.
- In the Spring 2026 episode, Geoff skipped over scoring Yowayowa Teacher, finding it too boring compared to other similar ecchi comedies he's previously reviewed.
As noted above, the Pop Arena rates Goosebumps books with a random object out of 10. However, they gave both Night of the Living Dummy III and Say Cheese and Die-Again! nothing. The former is said in their usual way and was due to being so disappointed by it and the latter is said in rushed anger because of how much it offended them.
Something Awful's "WTF, D&D!?" column reviews bad or otherwise bizarre Tabletop Games. However, their page for F.A.T.A.L. wasn't so much a review as it was a top-ten list of reasons why they refused to review it.

Western Animation

Beavis and Butt-Head:
- They usually commented on music videos, but in two cases (Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice), they just stared in silent horror for a while before changing the channel. Subverted in a later episode where they came across the video for "Girl You Know It’s True" and actually did comment on it.
- A positive variation occurred when they spent an entire Ramones video headbanging.
- Another video was so dull and clichéd they simply turned the TV off. The home viewers' screen was also black, with no commentary, for the rest of the video-watching segment.

Broke the Rating Scale
25 Following

Examples by Medium Reviewed:

Still Within Bounds ("I'd give it a zero, but I can't.")

First to Hit The Limit ("Yes, there is a Zero.")

Out of Bounds ("On a Scale from One to Ten, this one goes up to eleven.")

Meaningless Comparison ("Final Score: 7 Bananas.")

Meaningless Value ("Up Yours out of 10.")

Impossible to Rate ("What.")

Refusal to Rate ("Scores don't apply here.")

Video Example(s):

A Cursed Dinner
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Broke the Rating Scale 25 Following

Examples by Medium Reviewed:

Still Within Bounds ("I'd give it a zero, but I can't.")

First to Hit The Limit ("Yes, there is a Zero.")

Out of Bounds ("On a Scale from One to Ten, this one goes up to eleven.")

Meaningless Comparison ("Final Score: 7 Bananas.")

Meaningless Value ("Up Yours out of 10.")

Impossible to Rate ("What.")

Refusal to Rate ("Scores don't apply here.")

Video Example(s):

A Cursed Dinner Share Video Copied!

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Index

Next

A Cursed Dinner

Broke the Rating Scale
25 Following

A Cursed Dinner
Share Video Copied!