What Do The Numbers Mean

I believe that most if not all of the dealers that I have met know how to grade coins. They would not be in the business very long if they did not. That being said, grading is still very subjective. It is one person's opinion, and their opinion of a grade may be somewhat different from yours. But this is part of what makes coin collecting so fun. Not all dealers overgrade their coins. Some are actually very conservative and you can pick up a great deal if you have a good eye and you know how to grade accurately. I guess this is why I have always preferred raw coins over slabbed ones. However, I will look at slabbed coins at a show so I can compare grades (someone else's opinion) for coins in the same series as I am looking for.

Too many steps in the VF grade. A VF-20 doesn't look any different than a F-15 to me, especially when looking at Buffalo nickels. A little off topic but it just bugs me.

I remember when dealers use to call real nice AU's (AU-58) Commercial Unc's.

It's not necessary to purchase a Red Book for that info.
For a really good explanation, just go to Google.
Type in Coin Grading and you would find:
What Is The Sheldon Scale Of Coin Grading - Coins - About.com
Or use the Glossary at the left.
Lots of places where this is all explained.


In most instances serves no purpose. At many coin shows dealers come from sometimes great distances. Some will never come back to that show. Some may but infrequent. Making a freind of someone you may never see again to most dalers is useless.

The real problem with any grading system is the difficulty attempting to differentiating from one grade to the next.
You could take a AU-55 to one dealer and find it's AU-53 then to the next one and it is now AU-50. Even the so called professionals can't make up their minds. If you read enough posts here, you see how many take a coin from a TPGS slab, send to a different one, get a different grade.

Here is my own handy-dandy guide for understanding all of the different grading scale gobbildygook, distilled down from the most complex (on the left) to the most simple:



Although it says "Pennies" (as it was in the context of my penny albums) it tends to "work" like this with everything else too. :-)

They actually don't mean anything. They are merely an additional name for the grade. They could have used Pr-A,Fr-B,AG-C,G-D,VG-E or 1,2,3,4,5 ore even John, Joe, Mark, and George. The reason they use those numbers is because back in 1949 Dr Sheldon prices of 1794 large cents and to roughly the same extend all early date cents were priced at a consistant group of ratios. A Good coin sold for 4 times what a Poor coin sold for. A VG coin sold for twice what a Good sold for or eight times what a poor one did and so on. If you had a 1794 cent variety that sold for $1 in Poor, it sold for $4 in Good, $8 in VG, $12 in Fine, $20 in VF, $40 in XF, $60 in Unc and $65 for a high end Unc. Dr Sheldon thought he had discovered a natural law covering values of early date cents and if you knew the price in any grade by using the ratios you knew its value in all the other grades as well.

What he had actually discovered was a group of ratios that happened to be true AT THAT TIME. But as more collectors entered the hobby they naturally chased the better condition coins. So demand rose faster at the high end than at the low end and the ratios changed. By 1958 Sheldon was adding on layers of "special rules" and adjusting prices on the low end coins to try and force early date large cent prices back into those original ratios from 1949. Believe it or not the people in EAC continued trying to tweak rules and values up until 1972 to try and force them to obey the old ratios before the who idea of the ratio numbers was officially junked.

Then in 1977 the ANA decided to produce a book with the official written standards for the different grades. (Grade names which by the way had been in use since the 19th century) and they stuck those old ratio numbers back on to the grades. Its a mistake. Numbers imply precision and that something can be measured and/or calculated. But there is no measuring, calculating or precision in the subjective world of grading.

Yeah they're just trying to catch whatever fish are in the sea. They're hoping you can't see the problems, or grade it correctly, or tell that its really not RD or PL etc etc.... when in all probability THEY bought the coin for a fair price in order to try to pass it off as better. I mean they might as well try, even if its in a slab by PCGS or NGC.

Oh and the grade number joke Steve posted is good it isn't fair to Sheldon. He never suggested using all those grades. Sheldon used 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,10, 12,15, 20,25,30,35,40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, and 70. More at the lower end and less at the upper end, and fewer than the "What most people use" catagory.

Something PCGS started a couple years ago. Originally the gradng services only used 60.65, and 70. Then to get you to send your coins in and pay them again they pushed for the addition of 63 and 67. Then they added 64. Then they went all out and when to all the numbers from 60 to 70. After several rounds of coin submitting until most everything is maxed out, they had to come up with a new way to get you to pay to have your coins graded yet again, so they added on the + grade for high end for the grade coins. When everything gets maxed out again, they will probably either go to decimal point grading or the will finally introduce a new 1-100 grading scale.