Individual races are set a rating, in order to bunch together horses of similar standard. Before a horse can be assigned a rating, it needs to run a few races first, to give the judges an idea of how fast it is.
The presence of ratings in a horses form doesn’t necessarily make them accurate or reliable. Good ratings require a high degree of racing intelligence to construct and take a significant amount of effort to maintain. Rating a race horse for the first time is actually fairly simple for the handicappers.
It is important to mention that all ratings are at weight-for-age, so that equal ratings mean horses of equal merit. The merit of each horse it is possible to weigh up is given as a rating, in pounds, and arrived at by the use of handicapping techniques which include careful examination of a horse’s running against other horses.