I'm writing up specs for a website with learning materials for our alpha testers to comment on. Among others, I'm describing the rating system: the materials can be rated (…) several criteria (such as usefulness, quality), e.g. by giving 3 stars for usefulness and 5 for quality.
Is "according to" the only proper way to link "rate" and "criteria" in this case? Can we rate by quality? rate on quality? 'rate in quality'?
I would usually just say 'rate the quality', without a preposition or anything, but I can't really use that in a passive sentence about the materials, and I know that even if I change this specific sentence into an active one, I'll need the passive at some point as well…
(please note that I mean the act of rating (ie. giving stars or votes or whatever), not the act of sorting things by their ratings – which is I suspect why the 'by' and 'according to' options don't sound right to me)
Best Answer
The most obvious rewording that fixes this issue is:
But if you want to keep your original form, the best preposition would be:
Relevant NGram data for "rated * quality" show that "for" beats out "on" and "by" by significant margins.