I don't think it's changed in this instance, though breakpoints might've but we never knew the specific ones anyway. Most of the FICO testers I'm aware of don't tend to rack up a slew of inquiries (5+) on a single report, and they most certainly don't stretch their sprees out over time to try to isolate it.
There were plenty of times I didn't get an inquiry ding when I had inquiries on a report under FICO '04, illecs and many others found similarly, which lead me and others to conclude that inquiry count is graded on a step-function vis a vis:
- 0 -> 1 ding
- 1 -> 2 no ding
- 2 -> 3 ding
- 3 -> 4 no ding
- 4 -> 5 no ding
- 5 -> 6 ding
etc. Simplified and the numbers are likely not exact, but they also found that north of like 10 inquiries additional ones didn't do any damage.
I had one really wierd one where I went from 0->1 and didn't see a change under FICO '04, but it wasn't isolated as I had a card which went from $458 -> $2 / 2000; I don't *think* this should've triggered a score change as my overall utilization was low and I've never seen a ding at that ratio on a single card, but it was my only scoreable inquiry at the time and I'm really struggling to not see how it didn't affect me. It could be the same thing as what you saw, *maybe* there's a thickness of file calculation vs. inquiry count? Can't really know at that level but if we're talking borrower risk I could see where that might be reasonable?
