To give the issue a sense of an academic taste, we can refer to Loretta J. Mester who is a vice president and economist in the Research Department of the Philadelphia Fed. She is also the head of the department’s Banking and Financial Markets section. In her article which is named as “What’s the Point of Credit Scoring?” Loretta J. Mester introduces credit scoring in a funny way as following:
“When one banker asks another “What’s the score?” shareholders needn’t worry that these bankers are wasting time discussing the ball game. More likely they’re doing their jobs and discussing the credit score of one of their loan applicants. Credit scoring is a statistical method used to predict the probability that a loan applicant or existing borrower will default or become delinquent. The method, introduced in the 1950s, is now widely used for consumer lending, especially credit cards, and is becoming more commonly used in mortgage lending.”

She also gives a strict definition of credit scoring:
“Credit scoring is a method of evaluating the credit risk of loan applications. Using historical data and statistical techniques, credit scoring tries to isolate the effects of various applicant characteristics on delinquencies and defaults. The method produces a “score” that a bank can use to rank its loan applicants or borrowers in terms of risk. To build a scoring model, or “scorecard,” developers analyze historical data on the performance of previously made loans to determine which borrower characteristics are useful in predicting whether the loan performed well. A well-designed model should give a higher percentage of high scores to borrowers whose loans will perform well and a higher percentage of low scores to borrowers whose loans won’t perform well. But no model is perfect, and some bad accounts will receive higher scores than some good accounts”