There have been many efforts reported in the literature to score or rate the quality of concept maps. In many cases the objective was to standardize procedures for grading student concept maps, but other efforts have served a variety of purposes, including guiding workshop participants to construct better concept maps or monitoring the advances in concept mapping techniques on a large population of users. We examine some of the criteria used by others for rating or scoring concept maps as “good” and propose a scheme that takes into account both graphical structure criteria and semantic or subject matter accuracy that we propose can lead to better, “excellent” concept maps. It has been said that presentations that are concise but capture the complexity of the content involved are elegant—and producing these kinds of concept maps should be our goal.
