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But my point was that the adjectives "overrated" and "underrated" refer to instances in which the assessment of an item's quality was considered to be inaccurate, either too generous or too harsh, respectively. To me this implies that "to rate" something is to make an accurate assessment of its quality. But I don't think it really does carry this de-/con-notation: much as with "interpret", the verb "to rate" is equivocal on whether the resulting assessment was a fair or accurate one.
Hmm, I do think that "to rate" implies accuracy, even if a rating does not necessarily imply the same, perhaps a controversial take in performance review season, but I think of that as "giving ratings" rather than "rating".
But then this gives us the prefix issue of that it being clear that an undercooked dish has not been cooked enough and that an overcooked dish has been cooked too much, a common sense application of over/under. What, then, does it mean to do insufficient/excessive accurate assessment? (Since this was all still very common sense with cook, perhaps over/under are just not good prefixes for us to do this with at all.)
It's interesting again because the words "overrated" and "underrated" are only ever used in the context of qualitative assessments which are extremely subjective, namely those of artistic works. "Breaking Bad is an overrated TV show" sounds normal; "the bridge collapsed because the inspector overrated the quality of the steel used in its construction" sounds weird, even if that's literally what happened.
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