This website gives you some information on the process for grading stakes.
The more objective part of it looks fine to me. Here are the two notes that may have impacted some of the controversial changes this year that get more subjective. This is also where politics could creep into the process, which imo is obviously a problem.
Franklin-Simpson turf sprint
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If the Committee considers that a race takes on special importance because it is one of the few of its kind (e.g., sprint for older females), such a race might be graded higher than a race that has similar statistics but is one of many in its own category.
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Some questionable downgrades may have been impacted by this
Quote:
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Small fields sometimes can be looked upon as indication of a poor event, but it must be remembered also that small fields may be the result of exceptional quality.
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I would add that imo using speed figures as part of the process is a bad idea when the goal is to ascertain FIELD quality not just a race that came up fast because of figure error, conditions or a standout winner.
First off, why use one set of figures? We know various sets of high quality figures often disagree -and sometime very significantly. Second, even when they more or less agree, there are race development issues that can have a very significant impact on the times of races. Unless they are using PAR times covering 5-6 years or more, figures can be misleading in any given year or two.
https://toba.org/graded-stakes/
