Film · 1984 · Films · 1980s
Police Academy
Scored from 180 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
When a new mayor opens the police academy to all recruits regardless of qualifications, a chaotic group of misfits enrolls, including a wisecracking troublemaker forced into training as an alternative to jail. Despite the efforts of a hostile commanding officer to wash them out, the oddball cadets bumble their way through basic training.
Released in 1984, Police Academy is a comedy film. Its comedy subtype is Goofy.
A second review pool sits behind it as well: 2,970 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. 180 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 186 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Police Academy lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 180.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
