Score Comparisons on TrueSWFans

How to interpret the score comparisons charts on TrueSWFans

 

TrueSWFans is a site devoted to providing ratings that show what Star Wars fans thought of a particular film or series. For each piece of live-action media, we provide a chart that compares 5 scores for the work being examined: two of these are scores internal to the site, and three are from major film databases, all compared side-by-side.

Three Major Film Database Scores

The three major film databases that are used in the chart are: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic. These scores are included in the chart and updated regularly until the score stops changing due to a high number of submissions rendering the score relatively fixed. For comparison, all three scores are adjusted to be displayed on a 10-point scale.  IMDb scores appear essentially identical to their value on IMDb’s website. The only caveat is when there are multiple seasons of a series for Star Wars, IMDb does not distinguish an overall score for each season, but only includes an overall audience score for all seasons combined. To solve this issue and still provide IMDb ratings for individual seasons when there is more than a single season, the average of all episodes in the season is combined to produce a score for that particular season. Rotten Tomatoes‘ score only includes the All Audience score, as the Critics Score contains a smaller number of voters (less statistical power) and has historically been thought to be less reflective of what Star Wars fans rated the material. Using the same rationale, Metacritic’s score includes only the User Score and ignores the Metascore. 

The scores displayed on TrueSWFans for all 3 databases are updated regularly when a piece of Star Wars material is relatively new. Once that work’s ratings become generally stable through a large number of submissions (typically a few weeks to months after the final release of the material), then the score is only infrequently updated on an as-needed basis to accurately reflect the most up-to-date ratings for each database.

 

Two Fan-Based Star Wars Scores

At TrueSWFans, we have created two unique Star Wars scores that you can use to compare against popular movie databases. Each score is meant to reflect specifically what Star Wars fans think. The ‘True Fan Score’ is a score that any user on TrueSWFans can submit and is an even-weighted average of all submissions for a given piece of Star Wars media. Since only users who have passed the True Fan quiz can submit scores on the site, this score reflects the opinions of individuals who possess a broad general knowledge of Star Wars.

 

 

The ‘GAFFI Score’ (also called the ‘Fan Critic Score’) is a unique score that can only be submitted by ‘Star Wars Fan Critics‘. These critics are very knowledgeable Star Wars fans who possess accounts on the site and have also submitted a fan critic application and received approval. This process is somewhat rigorous as the application requires an applicant to demonstrate their high level of interest in Star Wars- as well as strong commitment to rating scores. In addition, these applicants must also pass a more advanced Star Wars quiz (included in the application), demonstrating their strong depth of Star Wars knowledge.

The GAFFI Score is also unique in that each score submission is a composite of 10 factors, each individually rated by a given Fan Critic (worth 50% of the total score) and then averaged with a Fan Critics’ overall impression (also worth 50% of the total score) to produce a final score for each fan critic. The 10 factors for each piece of Star Wars media are the same and are rated using a Likert Scale as demonstrated in the example below.