Film · 1960 · Films · 1960s
School for Scoundrels
Scored from 38 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael), a diffident young Londoner, loses every encounter he enters: his own office staff ignore him, a pair of crooked used-car dealers fleece him, and the swaggering cad Raymond Delauney (Terry-Thomas) beats him at tennis and walks off with the girl he is courting, April Smith. In desperation Henry enrols at the College of Lifemanship in Yeovil, where Mr S. Potter (Alastair Sim) teaches gamesmanship and one-upmanship, the art of unsettling an opponent without ever breaking a rule. Newly trained, Henry sets out to reverse each of his humiliations in turn. Robert Hamer's British comedy adapts Stephen Potter's spoof self-help books into a run of tactical duels fought in very polite English settings.
School for Scoundrels (1960) is a film IMDb files under the comedy genre. It was made in the United Kingdom. The runtime is 97 minutes.
Only 38 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 39 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside.
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 School for Scoundrels 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 · 1960s (1,929 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 38.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
