I was wondering if anyone who posts here knows much about "scorecards"? - from what I understand at Fair Isaac they have a FICO score broken down into 10 what they call "scorecards", or consumer categories. Under '08 it may have been increased to 15 cards. So really, every person is not judged against each other, but rather against the people that fall into your scorecard. For example, one scorecard is all people that have a tax lien, another is for BK filers. My question if anyone knows, say you are in the "tax lien" scorecard, what is the max FICO for that group? I mean, assuming everything else on your file is positive, would it be a max of 680? 750? 800+? I first dicovered the scorecard system when my wife had filed a BK, and when we worked on removing her old accounts when they aged, her score actually dropped like a rock when the public record of the BK was removed before her charged off accounts came off. Meaning that, her FICO was much higher when she was in the BK Scorecard, because her overall credit was better than the others that she was compared to who had filed BK, whereas her credit was horrible when moved into the 'regular joe' scorecard or whatever the next one she fell into was. The easiest one to have a high score in (that I've seen) is the "thin file" scorecard - like those who have 1-3 accounts only, or the "short history" one I think they also have, for immigrants, college students, etc.
Great question, however the answers are highly guarded. FICO does have several "buckets" for scoring relative to others in the same bucket or scorecard. Combine this with "enhanced FICO scores" for areas such as mortgage, auto loan, etc, and the possible scoring outcomes become exponential. Ironically, the model does have good intentions with the buckets or scorecards. It attempts to evaluate the overall credit worthiness of a person; it tries to look at a negative event or information as a "possible flyer", rather than an indicator of behavior. I personally do not know how many scorecards FICO uses, I think they change with the marketplace demands and events. The new "thin file" model is designed to portray young creditors more accurately, though this is counter intuitive. As a note, the overall FICO model scoring weights do not make extrapolative sense for behavior prediction (IMHO only). I also do not know what the "max" scores are in each bucket. I have seen scores that do not make sense based upon the negative information contained in a file. I have also seen FICO scores drop as negative information was removed, and the person changed to a "higher bucket". Bottom line, we'll never completely crack the FICO model!
