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What's the best number of rating scale options?
What's the best number of rating scale options?

Should you have a 1 to 5 point scale? Or 1 to 6? Or 1 to 10? ...

Paddy Mann avatar
Written by Paddy Mann
Updated over a week ago

In Spidergap, you can customize the rating scale used to assess people's performance. It's possible to have up to 10 options, as well as the N/A option.

By default, we provide a 5-point scale:

Many organizations choose to customize this and use β€” for example β€” a 4, 6, or 10 point scale. All of these can work well.

We choose a 5-point scale as we've found that it will normally give enough variation in the responses to be useful, while also keeping the scale simple and easy to use for people providing feedback.

How to increase the variation in scores given

The main reason to increase the number of options is to increase the "variation" in the the scores given. For example, if you discover that everyone is giving a score of 4 out of 5 for most questions, then increasing the number of options can help.

Alternatively, you may find that tweaking the wording or making the scale "unbalanced" can help. Unlike the scale above, an unbalanced scale does not have the same number of positive and negative options. This can make a lot of sense, as it's a lot more common for people to give positive feedback than negative.

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