Film · 2006 · Films · 2000s
The History Boys
Scored from 137 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2000s (7,847 peers).
Summary
A group of bright, eccentric sixth-form students at a Yorkshire grammar school in the 1980s prepare for Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams under the guidance of two very different teachers: the beloved, unorthodox Hector, who teaches general studies as an end in itself, and the slick young Irwin, hired to coach them in counterintuitive exam technique. Tensions over pedagogy, ambition, sexuality, and what education is really for play out among the boys and their mentors.
The History Boys is a 2006 comedy, drama and romance film.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 7,846 2000s films, not against the whole corpus. The calibrated figure is built from 137 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 143 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
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 The History Boys 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 · 2000s (7,847 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 137.
Cohort: Films · 2000s
