Where in the world was the Quality Control at CGC??? 43 43

[bc]

As a comparison:

From July 25, 2023 to August 5, 2023 (9 business days) , here's the breakdown (again from CGCDATA.COM)

From to July 18, 2023 to July 25, 2023 (6 business days), here's the breakdown:

-bc

[bc]

Here's July 11, 2023 to July 18, 2023 (6 business days):

-bc

[RockMyAmadeus]

On 8/20/2023 at 3:26 PM, Tnexus said:

It's 2 graders now. Been that for a few years.

[bc]

For July 11, 2023 to August 15, 2023 (26 business days)

By my abacus, that's a total of 141,255 books or 5,433 books for an 8 hour, 5 day a a week operation. 

This is in the ballpark for producing a widget every 5 or 6 seconds.

-bc

[bc]

If there are 10 ME's per day out of 5,433 unique widgets, that works out to a success rate of 99.82%.

Just trying to provide perspective based on data.

-bc

[bc]

Same period Without Variants

Total without variants is 81,470 widgets.

With variants was 141,255, so variants accounted for 59,785 subs or 42.3%.

-bc

[Gaard]

I'm not that good at math. What if there are 100 ME's per day?

[bc]

On 8/20/2023 at 8:39 PM, Gaard said:

I'm not that good at math. What if there are 100 ME's per day?

That's down to a 98.16% success rate.

-bc

[bc]

Math would be:

(Total books - Total ME's) / (Total Books)  * 100 = Success Percent

(5433 - 100) / (5433)  * 100 = Success Rate

(5333 / 5433) * 100 = Success Rate

(0.98159) * 100 = Success Ratw

98.16% Success Rate or a 1.84% ME rate.

-bc

[Gaard]

On 8/20/2023 at 8:59 PM, bc said:

Math would be:

(Total books - Total ME's) / (Total Books)  * 100 = Success Percent

(5433 - 100) / (5433)  * 100 = Success Rate

(5333 / 5433) * 100 = Success Rate

(0.98159) * 100 = Success Ratw

98.16% Success Rate or a 1.84% ME rate.

-bc

my head hurts

[comicginger1789]

I like the math provided. CGC is run by humans and bound to fluff up, sometimes minor and sometimes royally. 
 

It that occurs less than 1% of the time well you can’t get much better than that. If it occurs 5% of the time, to me that would be too high. And again as long as they are trying to fix the mistakes (compensation, books replacement when able, etc) then they can continue to be the kings of the biz 

[comicginger1789]

On 8/19/2023 at 6:38 PM, ADAMANTIUM said:

That is a lot to get done in 20 seconds, I don't see it as possible with their YouTube vids explaining the process .

I know similar books get subbed a lot, so they might know in advance what to look for, although with moderns that keep getting subbed and are new? The list of manufacturing errors and other tallies that must be memorized...

Nope 20 seconds isn't going to do it.

 

It’s wrong but most books 1990 to now probably get graded very fast. Heck I’m sure sometimes the don’t even count pages or look inside. Just front cover, flip back cover and inside page to get PQ. Not that it’s right but if they get the “right” grade with no issues 99% of the time, who are they to care further 

[Get Marwood & I]

On 8/20/2023 at 11:22 PM, ExNihilo said:

I'm just saying that if they're grading 28,472 books per week, or 12 books per minute, even with 16 graders, they're looking at a book every 1m15s.  Tack on the fact that supposedly each book is reviewed by 3 graders, and really that means in order to process 28,472 books a week, there are a total of 85,416 total reviews (28,472 x 3 = 85,416).  With that in mind, in order to pump out 28,472 books each week, each grader spends about 0m25s reviewing each book.  That presumes that graders are reviewing books non-stop when the reality is they are marking down notes, filing, removing books from bags, taking breaks, etc.  Based on what we know based on these figures (and I don't quite know if we can attest to the accuracy of this data), graders are spending very little time reviewing books.  This with the fact that it appears QC is non-existent really puts into doubt the quality of the work behind the scenes.  So that all leads to my wish that they reduced the number of books reviewed per day/week (quality over quantity), which will in turn increase turnaround times.

Right, thanks. If correct, your process timing calculations strengthen my theory that AI might be grading a lot of the books. Maybe the human graders just do the pre-moderns which seem to represent a much smaller part of the overall volume if BCs extracted data is correct. If you were running a grading company, and got a human to count the pages, do a resto check and look for internal issues on every submission, and the statistics then showed that 99.8% of moderns always had the right number of pages, no resto and no internal structural issues, what would you do? Carry on doing that, or accept the risk of that tiny percentage of books with issues getting through and then being discovered?

Carney's AI might be sorting the books into work queues and sending everything before a given date to the humans for grading and grading the rest itself - probably at the same time - based just on the covers. It then directs those to encapsulation having populated the records. AI may even then do some QC. If it can identify any title from a possibility list of millions, it could match the cover title to the label etc. There are lots of opportunities for it to add value, I'm sure.

Anyway, it's not our business what CGC do or how they do it. It's fun to speculate, but all we can do is decide whether to pay for the end service. If we're happy, we carry on submitting. If we're not, we have the option of not using them (although most seem to carry on if this thread is any indicator). When the process works, the end product looks fabulous. When it doesn't, it gets posted about here and in other places online. Mike says that CGC has a very low failure rate. That's probably true. When greggy does one of his 98 thousand graded book acquisition posts they all look fine to me. So maybe this thread and others do only represent a very small failure rate. Thousands of happy people, who say nothing, scores of unhappy people, who post here. Who knows. Those kinds of figures would be acceptable in most industries though, I'll bet. 

I've only joined in here because, once again, I've come to the forum looking for fun and interaction and this thread stands out. CGC don't pay attention to it. They don't change their practices or anything because of it or any other thread. They have their model and it's working for them. Use it, don't use it. If you complain, Mike may send examples of systematic failure through, and then nothing will happen. Five years in, and the solution to Newton Rings - after all that debate - is that they can't / won't fix them and they're now normal. For me, that is why I pause before submitting. It's not because I fear being in the tiny failure rate group (although I'm lucky like that). It's because if the failure rate is very low, then CGC should be remediating customers. The cost of doing so would be low, as the failure rate is low. But they're not. They're trying to normalise failure and have you pay for it. That's the reason I'm hesitant to use them.

[Sigur Ros]

On 8/21/2023 at 4:25 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

It's not because I fear being in the tiny failure rate group

I've been in that tiny failure rate group too often.  Which obviously makes me question how tiny it really is.

[GeeksAreMyPeeps]

On 8/21/2023 at 8:42 AM, Sigur Ros said:

I've been in that tiny failure rate group too often.  Which obviously makes me question how tiny it really is.

Yeah, it's been a while since I've had a shipment that hasn't included a slab that had to be sent back for ME. And that includes shipments that were already sent back for ME. I just sent 8 or so books back from a shipment of 14 ME books. Most of those 14 were from a single shipment of 25 that initially came back.

[GeeksAreMyPeeps]

On 8/20/2023 at 11:44 AM, Ride the Tiger said:

According to the sites meet the graders page, they have 16.

I assumed that page were basically the leaders of various teams of graders, not all of the graders.

[Wintersgate]

Has anyone else had a squarish divot in the inner sleeve.  Was sent back as a mechanical error and came back with this, admittedly, somewhat hard to photo issue (may or may not have added creases to the book, can't tell from the original graded photos, but I think so).

[wardevil0]

On 8/21/2023 at 12:26 PM, Wintersgate said:

Has anyone else had a squarish divot in the inner sleeve.  Was sent back as a mechanical error and came back with this, admittedly, somewhat hard to photo issue (may or may not have added creases to the book, can't tell from the original graded photos, but I think so).

This looks like the defect that became known as "puddling," and was supposedly resolved a while back, IIRC.  Was this graded recently?

[Wintersgate]

Yes, it was graded about a month ago.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Wintersgate

[ExNihilo]

On 8/21/2023 at 1:25 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Carney's AI might be sorting the books into work queues and sending everything before a given date to the humans for grading and grading the rest itself - probably at the same time - based just on the covers. It then directs those to encapsulation having populated the records. AI may even then do some QC.

The problem with this is CGC's advertised service is that grading is being looked at by two graders.  If it turns out they're not doing this, then it opens them up to legal action for false advertising.

 

On 8/21/2023 at 1:25 AM, Get Marwood & I said:

Anyway, it's not our business what CGC do or how they do it.

My personal position is it kind of is everyone's business.  If there are enough dumb issues that slip through QC to the point that CGC's reputation takes a hit, then that affects everyone who has a CGC book.  Look at PGX, they no doubt had books that were graded fine, but all the bad grading or outright lies ruined the label for everyone.  I realize that's an extreme example, but that's the sort of thing that worries me about CGC.  It takes years to build a reputation.  It only takes one bad day to bring it all down.  When I harp on CGC for all the dumb mistakes that get posted here, it's not because I'm trolling them, it's because I wish they would hold themselves to the same high standard we expect from them.