sgc tough grading...they are a-changin'

i'm glad sgc has loosen up a bit, cards with a heavy crease and a chunk of the corner missing is not even a 20 these days, but a 30! i'm sending all my future raw cards to SGC as everyone know they're the standard for prewar. honestly i don't know if the sarcasm is real or not

oh yea still looking for an e96 lajoie.



ok to be fair it's not THAT grossly overgraded. but you see some other crisp card with a little paper loss and it's automatically knocked to a 20. their scale/standard is kinda wacked!

Quan, I disagree
I think that card is substantually (SP.) over Graded.
I don't see how a card with a chunk missing gets a GOOD GRADE.
JMHO

The only other pre-war card I've seen that was more grossly overgraded was an n43 that was badly miscut and missing a border. It still ended up grading 60. Wish had copied the pic so I could show it.

Jay

While I agree that doesn't look like a 30, come on! If it is overgraded, how much is it overgraded by? 1 grade at most? That's not much to complain about when you see some cards graded NM with paper loss or wrinkles.

I got this one that looks like it was in a fire!! and its missing a hunk in the middle

my beef with sgc has always been they'd hammer a card for the smallest defect without looking at the whole card, and then randomly cards like the lajoie would pass by. their grading is very subjective and imo there's no clear scale you can follow along with.

but if the lajoie is where the trend is heading, then i'm all for it. sgc has always been a little too tight and err on the conservative. i want accurately graded cards, not the toughest graded.

I've taken a pile of cards and given them my best honest grade; then came back to that pile three weeks later and tried it again. Quite an eye opener!

I do not understand the preoccupation with the number assigned on a holder - everyone can see the features and problems of each card - why put so much emphasis on a grade at one point in time?

How consistent is possible?

I like the argument that the grader must've gotten laid the night before to explain this extreme overgrading. I will say that I had it graded on-site at a show and maybe they're a little more lenient with those submissions (maybe they don't go through as rigorous review).

I'd give it a 20, but in the Grand Scheme of Things, the 10-point difference on SGC's convoluted scale isn't a huge deal. Unless one is a visually impaired collector - and that'd be kind of weird, no? - most of us can see that the Lajoie isn't like the prototypical 30, whatever that happens to look like. For what it's worth, there was a similar Mayo Latham on the N54 B/S/T recently. I could've lived with its condition in absolute terms, but it just seemed so out of place in a 30, that I passed. The weird psychology of collectors, eh.

I totally agree with your other point Quan that sometimes the graders focus on a tree or two instead of seeing the forest - or whatever Big Picture metaphor you wanna use. I guess I tend to see the card as a whole rather than a sum of its corners, surface, etc., which actually presents some nice buying opportunities on cards with low numeric grades.

I agree they have been very easy recently -I had a few gifts on my last submission.


have a bunch of SGCs from the tough days and will probably leave them unless I sell and thats not going to happen.