Of course it's dumbed down 
. It's probably close in aggregate and likely has to be, but realistically trying to give a better explanation of it would make it needlessly complex and confusing.
What legal challenge would there be to reveal the algorithm? Damages? Of what sort? Who's fault is a derogatory which causes one's score to be tanked? Typically oneself, maybe a lender's though there's ways to address that, but not FICO. If it were forced to be revealed, we'd throw out pretty much every IP legal precedent... um, no, not for that I don't think heh.
I think you may be missing a salient point from a legal standpoint: it's not FICO's fault that your score is what it is. There are plenty of people who don't have the same issues I do, or you do regarding score.
What legal precedent is there? Should there be similar if I get a higher APR from Chase than someone else does even when my FICO is higher than theirs? That's a trivial example, but it's analogous. You really think it would take that long to convince a jury of one's peers that it's the customer's fault when they'd simply post the credit report as evidence, and then point at this site here for all sorts of publically available information of what they did wrong? Wouldn't need to disclose the entire algorithm nor would it be of benefit in this case: I fail to see any legal standing here - I suspect it'd be laughed at as entitlement mentality in the courtroom. Even kids understand (well some anyway) that you're not supposed to renege on a debt.
Further, there are plenty of lenders that'd love to get their hands on the algorithm directly. For that matter, the major lenders (and many smaller ones) have developed their own internal algorithms as well for their particular customer and product set when FICO's is pretty generic... for certain any lender would love to reduce their costs, if they could get the algorithm directly, they'd do so. The FICO / CRA / lender relationship isn't an easy one to understand, they're all slightly in competition with each other in various ways and everyone wants a slice of FICO's pie.
Have you ever tried to explain something complex to a layman? I'm not talking something like the tax code, or baseball rules or something well characterized, but something that's not so well published, like FICO, or quantum mechanics, or from another personal example, Law 11 (Offside) in soccer to any spectator and the majority of players, even sophisticated ones? I will tell you it's enormously difficult, even for the people on this forum who have the context.
Finally, we have enough information here already to play FICO reindeer games with our scores: for a fact, FICO and the lenders too don't like this as it breaks the predictive model, but we're such a small segment of the population anyway as to be irrelevant. If it were published further, it would be even worse, and to what end?
Getting a high FICO isn't hard (per se, have to be disciplined), and no lender tiers above 760 anyway and it's nearly unarguable what it takes to get above that:
- Have sufficient numbers of tradelines (call it 3 open revolving and 2 open installment)
- Always pay on time, and at least (ideally more than) the minimum - never miss a payment
- Don't open a bunch of frivolous accounts (though time heals this one too much like any derogatory)
- Don't rack up more debt on your revolving accounts than you can afford to write a check for: so that it can be optimized in a one month reporting window (FICO reindeer games); otherwise refinance said debt into an installment loan of some sort if possible.
- Let time do it's magic, seriously just sit on your hands. Walk away from the forum or whatever else it takes to simply be patient if required.
That's really all there is to it. Why do we need more elements in the risk model, what constitutes a bucket vs. what doesn't? Having more data isn't going to help that much more, it's a simple enough thing to accomplish other than humans suck at being patient these days.
@gen-specific wrote:In the meantime I got a chance to skim some of FICO's patents and the case law surrounding their consumer credit scoring mechanism
Didn't really get information about the credit score algorithm but I didn't realize they did so much.
Yes, there is the point that some of us are able to swing our credit score by 100 points every six months, but the legal aspect is a red herring to this problem.
On a side note: After reading about the court case with FICO and the Vantage Score competitor, I'm not too concerned about Vantage Scores even though no lenders use them.
Chase provided me a VS score on my Freedom underwriting. I wouldn't call that no lenders . I'm guessing it's probably on the order of 5-10% of the market perhaps? Supposedly from a Chase insider it is cheaper than a FICO score currently.
@Revelate wrote:
@gen-specific wrote:In the meantime I got a chance to skim some of FICO's patents and the case law surrounding their consumer credit scoring mechanism
Didn't really get information about the credit score algorithm but I didn't realize they did so much.
Yes, there is the point that some of us are able to swing our credit score by 100 points every six months, but the legal aspect is a red herring to this problem.
On a side note: After reading about the court case with FICO and the Vantage Score competitor, I'm not too concerned about Vantage Scores even though no lenders use them.
Chase provided me a VS score on my Freedom underwriting. I wouldn't call that no lenders
yes, Fair Isaac and myFICO went to court with transunion, experian and equifax and vantagescore basically regarding this
VantageScore was created to be a tri-bureau credit indicator with lower licensing fees, my conclusion after reading it was that I'm not even mad about FAKOs anymore. They're similar enough to FICO and I began to realize my disdain for them was mostly because I had been hanging out on FICO forums
@gen-specific wrote:
@Revelate wrote:
@gen-specific wrote:In the meantime I got a chance to skim some of FICO's patents and the case law surrounding their consumer credit scoring mechanism
Didn't really get information about the credit score algorithm but I didn't realize they did so much.
Yes, there is the point that some of us are able to swing our credit score by 100 points every six months, but the legal aspect is a red herring to this problem.
On a side note: After reading about the court case with FICO and the Vantage Score competitor, I'm not too concerned about Vantage Scores even though no lenders use them.
Chase provided me a VS score on my Freedom underwriting. I wouldn't call that no lenders
yes, Fair Isaac and myFICO went to court with transunion, experian and equifax and vantagescore basically regarding this
VantageScore was created to be a tri-bureau credit indicator with lower licensing fees, my conclusion after reading it was that I'm not even mad about FAKOs anymore. They're similar enough to FICO and I began to realize my disdain for them was mostly because I had been hanging out on FICO forums
There are FAKO's and then there are FAKO's: I'm not positive that it's proper to term VS as a FAKO honestly, or we need some halfway house term for actual lender legitimate scores which are available which both VS 2.0 and 3.0 are from various places in addition to being used in call it 10% of lending decisions (maybe).
Anything that's an educational score should be unilaterally ignored: those are true FAKO's and utterly useless to track other than for giggles.
While I don't beat the drum of thou shalt follow FICO only, the fact is there's enough freebie FICO's available for most people that it makes sense to track one of those for their benchmarking rather than something like the Experian Plus or the CK provided TU New Accounts Score.