Is PCGS Just Bad At Grading British Coins?

SaturnD51 that makes perfect sense, and I figure as well not everyone is going to grade coins from other countries perfectly. (Case in point, I wouldn't know a Morgan from a Walking Liberty if it bit me, let alone how to grade either one!)

Yes, US grading standards, particularly for circulated coins, are "more lax". It's called "gradeflation".

Long long ago - like, back in the Renaissance era, the 1500s and 1600s - the adjectives coin collectors used to grade coins were quite literal. A coin in Good condition actually was pretty good, a coin in Fair condition was pretty fair, and so forth. Everybody only collected ancient and mediaeval coins back then, and such coins rarely come in what we would call "high grade". "Fine" was about as high a grade as anybody would have needed.

As minting technology advanced and coins could come out of the presses looking really nice, we needed to expand the vocabulary to fully describe these new shiny coins. Thus, Very Fine and Extra Fine were added. At some point, the concept of taking a coin straight from the press into the hands of a collector was invented, thus creating the "Uncirculated" grade.

But over time, grading standards slipped, due to much the same natural pressures that cause economic inflation - everybody wants higher graded coins, everybody thinks their own coins are nicer and higher grade than everybody else's, and coin dealers want to extract more money from collectors by claiming the coin is higher grade than it really is. Thus, the meanings and definitions of those adjectives slowly drifted away from their literal meaning and gradeflation crept into the coin market. So today, even in Britain, a coin in Good condition is actually rather awful.

We can see further evidence of gradeflation happening in more modern times by picking up any old "how to collect coins" book, from the 1960s or earlier, and looking at their "how to grade coins" chapter. I have a book from the 1960s that says that only about half of the coins in a mint roll are likely to qualify as "Uncirculated". Half of them, when technically, every single one of them must, by the definition of "mint roll", be "uncirculated".

Gradeflation has affected different coin markets around the world differently. Britain has suffered from gradeflation the least, and thus retains the "toughest" grading. America has suffered it the worst, and their grading standards are the sloppiest. Australia is about halfway between them. There's about one whole grade level between each of them. Thus, a coin that a British collector would call "Fine", an Australian would happily call "Very Fine" and an American would consider "Extremely fine".

All of this is fine and dandy, as long as the markets remain distinct and separate. Unfortunately, in today's modern global marketplace, they do not - and this ends up in confusion, and lots of "Americans can't grade coins properly" comments coming out of Britain and Australia. But they can "grade them properly", in terms of being rigidly defined and consistent - they're just using a different grading standard. The increasing popularity of American TPGs does have the unfortunate side-effect of forcing collectors outside of North America to learn two different grading standards (the American one and their own native one), and how to convert between the two. Fortunately, the Sheldon system widely used in North America makes it easy to discern which of the two grading systems is being used.

TLDR: yes, "XF40" is indeed supposed to mean "extremely fine". But the Americans have redefined "Extremely fine" to mean something different to what it means in Britain.

PCGS IS brutal when it comes to foreign coins .
Especially European , Canadian and Australian circulated
grades coins . Laughable really!

dgwright - I agree. I'd grade this coin as Fine.


(photos from Great Collections)

There was a member who once posted about AI grading of coins. I agree that they should have AI grade coins therefore we would have grades we could not object to. That might be a possibility in the near future, who knows if it would ever happen. I myself believe CAC is a strong grader of coins.