PCGS Reconsideration Program

Or you can look at it as a win win situation, you would not submit a run of the mill coin only valuable rarer stuff so every grade increase is worth thousands. what is 1%

I suggest you research the term "grading creep". It is most definitely real and has impacted the upper levels of mint state grading over the past 25 years.

It is the evolution of how coins were first graded. I don't necessarily think of this as grade creep along a linear scale... most like a refinement of the upper 5 grade points of the Sheldon scale.

I cannot speak for the 1980s, I was too busy riding motorcycles and earning my "social education"... and the 1990s was consumed with grad school. But from what I can remember in my early days of collecting was the transition of Unc, BU, Choice BU, and Gem BU into Sheldon grades MS-60-62, MS-63, MS-64, and MS-65, respectively. MS-65 was the pinnacle of the grades, and if you had one, you crossed it off your list and moved on.

I think with the addition of competitive registry sets, folks began to examine their coins more closely, and come to notice that not all MS-65 coins are the same, there are many superior coins out there, so the hair-splitting and logic arguments began. If coin X is MS-65, then coin Y is noticeably better, and therefore has to be higher. Every grading company out there cashed in on this, but it actually makes more sense now, than it did 25 years ago. After searching many sealed mint bags and BU rolls, I know a gem MS-66 or better is a true treasure, and it stands so far above other MS-65s.When you see enough coins, you know a MS-66 grade instantly when you see one, because it is stunning.

An example: I sometimes send 4 or more nickel dollars in of the same date to PCGS, and sometimes they all come back the same grade. Yet, I look at them all and can easily rank them from worst to best, and select the "best" one of that grade, for my own collection. In our own minds, we are splitting the grades, and that is where the '+' came into play. Better than most at one grade, but not good enough to be a grade higher. I must say, PCGS is quite stingy with the different series' of coins I collect, but I know a gem when I see it, and generally am pretty accurate with my grade vs PCGS (some expensive lessons were learned along the way, as most of my collection used to be in ICCS flips).

The other PCGS "creep" into Canadian coins has been the recent attribution of CAM (Cameo) and DCAM (Deep Cameo) with PL and SP strikes, and the bonus marks attributed to them. Of course, PCGS will make even more money here, but the collectors wanted this - the market clearly has shown how desired ICCS Cameo, Heavy Cameo, and Ultra Heavy Cameo ICCS coins already were.

do all dealers do this?
to me, it just sounds like a scheme for a quick turnaround in profit. is this built into the coin dealing system? dealer wins, grading company wins, buyer loses. not all buyers are dealers themselves. Am I correct in saying this can this only be done once? yet is this information given when buying a coin? or it it indicated in any way that it has been done? I would want to know if a coin had been through this program because that could affect the final value of the coin. if I buy a coin that has gone through this service and then send it in again for the same service, they would reject it.
i think such a scheme should never have been introduced.

if it comes down to judging the coin without the holder, many simply do not have the long experiece of dealers. so they rely on grading companies. now with the fakes coming out, buyers are more and more becoming dependent on these grading companies. how can you get new collectors if you cannot trust these grading companies, and it seems to me that offering higher grades for money, which is essentially what this program is, is breaching the customers trust.

and as far as the comment "they don't manipulate their results in order to milk potential profits.", I appreciate your opinion, but the fact that grades are never assessed as lower means its manipulated. can you imagine how many submissions there would be if the risk of a lower grade existed? I'm guessing that would kill this program.

It"s not just dealers many collectors will try if you have a key date coin and all your friends agree that it would upgrade why not a 1948 dollar MS 63 close to 3500,00 today a MS64 maybe 5500,00 or touch more, would you buy or sell a key date coin raw be like throwing money away. Took 40 years or so for the main TPG to gain their trust, this reconsideration service is a no lose to the submitter and 1% fee to me is alright PCGS is like a 6 month or longer wait.

You can generally tell through the holder. MS-65 and MS-66 are significantly different if you know what you are looking at. I'm talking about people who have graded thousands of coins, they can tell just by looking typically. Someone with very little experience, not so much.

Think of it like CAC in the US. You get a green one and the grade is generally nice for the grade, on the higher end of the grade. (so like a + from PCGS, sort of) You get a gold one and it's at least one full grade higher, if not more - generally high end for the next grade higher at a minimum. Same thing sending it back to PCGS, except they actually reholder it with the new grade rather than put a sticker on it.

You can't tell if a coin has been sent in for CAC or not in the US. Same thing for some coins sent in for reholdering and regrading. You may be able to tell by the holder type versus the cert#, but you won't know for sure what has been done unless you can find the identical coin in an old auction or something.

Lots of coins sent into PCGS for grade reconsideration come back with no change. They don't just automatically upgrade all coins, or even most of them. A lot come back in the same old holder.

I was thinking along the lines of Phil310, does the grader know it's a "reconsideration" (if so I would think they are looking for a way to creep it up), or are they totally in the dark and unbiased in their grading?