Do grades have absolute meaning? An experiment on majority judgment

Whether in education, performance reviews, or elections, grades serve as tools for assessment, yet the universality of their meanings remains an open question. When voting under majority judgment, voters assign verbal grades such as “excellent, very good, good, fairly good, acceptable, insufficient, to reject” to each candidate. The meaning of these grades should be clear and consistent across all voters. Balinski and Laraki (2011) describe this as a “common language” and claim that the grade labels convey absolute meaning. This paper tests the assumption of absolute meaning by examining whether the meaning of a grade depends on the grading scale (i.e., framing effect) in a political context. We conducted an online experiment (N = 1955) in which participants voted for candidates to the French presidential elections under majority judgment with grading scales with different numbers of grades. Our findings indicate that the grade distributions obtained by candidates are significantly influenced by the grading scales available to voters. Our data therefore rejects the assertion that grades convey absolute meaning, showing instead that their interpretation depends on the number of grades available.