# A grade is a consensus, not a measurement

> Two grading systems exist for the same rock because two groups argued about difficulty separately for decades. A bouldering conversion table is a diplomatic document, not a scientific one.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/bouldering-grade-scale

Two columns, six rows. 6A against V3. 6B against V4. 6C against V5. A boxed row: 7A against V6.
Then 7B against V8, 7C against V9.

Nobody measured any of this. A lot of people agreed on it, which is a different thing.

## Why do two grading systems exist for the same problem?

Because the French scale and the American V-scale grew up on opposite sides of an ocean, judging
difficulty by feel rather than by any instrument, and nobody was in the room reconciling them as
they went.

Climbing has no stopwatch and no finish line to measure against. A grade is set by the people who
first climbed a problem and the people who repeated it afterwards, arguing it up or down by
consensus until it settles. Two continents of climbers doing that separately for decades produces
two scales that describe the same rock in two different vocabularies, which is why a conversion
table has to exist at all.

## Why doesn't the table line up evenly all the way down?

Because consensus doesn't arrive at the same rate on both sides.

Near the top of the table, 6A to V3 and 6B to V4 sit a single grade apart on each scale, because
these are grades climbed and re-graded by enough people on both continents that agreement was easy
to reach. Further down this table, the gap widens — 7A to 7C spans V6 to V9, three V-grades for two
French steps. That's not the table being wrong. It's where the disagreement between two
separately-run consensuses actually lives, and printing it honestly means printing the gap rather
than smoothing it into a false straight line.

## What does the boxed row actually mark?

Not the hardest grade on the card, or a target — just wherever somebody currently is.

A grade only means something relative to the climber reading it. Boxing 7A on this card isn't a
claim about difficulty in the abstract; it's a personal marker, the row where one person's own
climbing happens to sit right now, on a scale built collectively by climbers who will never climb
that specific problem or meet that specific climber.

## Can a gym or a club run its own grading, and does that belong on a shirt?

Both scales printed here are open conventions, used across the sport by anyone who climbs. A
particular wall's own house grading — a colour system, a local scale a gym invented for its own
sets — is that gym's, and a member's card built around it is closer to
[a club object made for the people inside it](/stories/club-and-society-shirts) than to a
universal conversion table like this one.

## Isn't a route drawn by the person who climbed it the more honest kind of climbing shirt?

That's a real and different object, and it isn't this one.
[A topo records one specific ascent, in one person's own hand](/stories/climbing-shirt) — it's
a first-person account of a route. A grade is the opposite kind of document: it's what an entire
community of strangers decided about a problem, averaged over years and arguments, with no single
climber's name attached to it anywhere. Both are worth printing. They're not the same claim.

## Does a grade table work for a different sport's own disputed scale?

Anywhere two groups independently invented a difficulty ladder for the same activity and never
fully reconciled it.

[A trick list, ticked off by one skater](/stories/skateboard-trick-list) is closer to a
personal record than a consensus table, but the underlying grades a trick sits at — how hard a
kickflip is judged to be, relative to a heelflip — went through a similar informal, argued-over
settling process before anyone wrote them down as fact.

## Does a table like this print well?

Yes, and a grid this simple is close to ideal.

Two flat columns and a single boxed row give the eye somewhere obvious to land without needing a
border round the whole thing — the ruled lines of the table are enough of an edge on their own.
Cream on charcoal carries the figures cleanly; the orange is worth spending on the one boxed row,
so a personal marker stays visually distinct from the reference table around it.

## How do I get one made?

Describe your table at [JustOG](/) — which grades, which system, and which row to box. Pick a
direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and
shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Six rows of two numbers, agreeing with each other less and less as they go up.