To be consistent with myself, I’ll document the meaning and process I go through when sorting through images from a shoot.

0 star – images are brought in at no stars. (not kept)
1 star – technically good image. either sharp, or interesting (not kept)
2 star – image shows good emotional content or is visually interesting. would not be embarrased to show this image. keep to have a variety of images of same event. when choosing from several very similar images, one gets 3 stars, while the other stay at 2 stars (keeper)
3 star – image shows great emotional content or very visually interesting. these are images that I show. (keeper)
4 star – used in conjunction with 3 star, if finer granularity is needed. (keeper)
5 star – outstanding image. when having to choose only several images from a large set (keeper)

The most time consuming portion of the sorting is going from 0 stars to 1 star. At least in my current state of photographic competency, a lot of images get discarded due to out of focus result. This can result in moving only 1/10 (or less) of the images to 1 star, yet I still have to look through all the images. Each subsequent step is much easier as there are less images to look through.