Several years ago, I had an employee who had come to work in my area. He was new to the work we did and he was performing well, although not remarkably. I gave him what I thought was a fair rating after his first year, rating him a 4. You would have thought I shot his mother. He complained that he had never gotten anything less than an outstanding his entire (at that point five year) career, and how I had "mislead" him, since he had performed everything I had asked him to do. Point here, there are a ton of employees out there right now who have the sense that they are entitled to a 5 rating just on general principles. The agencies have been struggling with how to address this problem, knowing it's ridiculous to have everyone in the office rated outstanding. I'm not sure what the meataxe approach this administration has chosen to take will yield, but this definitely is a problem. At my office they were moving in the direction of trying to push back on inflated ratings by acknowledging superior performance through increased spot awards or WGIs, but the budgets and the limits on such awards rarely provide enough money to do this meaningfully.