I was a graduate student in math at the time, so I find it hard to believe we were cutting edge! We used it in a more technical way than other people, as the numbers represented standard deviations, with the numbers going from 0 to 10, 5 being average. Outside the department I never heard it used to describe anything other than appearance (which is how we started using it) but we used it for lots of things, including rating movies, restaurants, and so on.
There was no actual upper or lower limit for us, but for a normal distribution being three standard deviations above the mean occurs just 3 times in 1000, so a 0 or 10 just didn't happen in practice, although I can recall a really bad movie being given a -10. And since not everything is normally distributed, there were occasionally technical disagreements about a score.