Is there a way to stop iTunes from automatically assigning album ratings?

Ever since I upgraded to Windows iTunes 12.2.1 (or maybe a version before), I've noticed that iTunes is automatically assigning album ratings to my albums.

I have a set of smart playlists that pull in songs that have no ratings, so that I can listen to them and eventually give them a rating.

Now that iTunes is giving my songs an "album rating", these playlists no longer work.

As near as I can tell, it looks like when I have a playlist on my iPhone (I've seen this with both iOS 8.3 and 8.4) with only 1 song from an album, if I rate that song with 3 stars, then the next time I sync with iTunes, the album rating for that song (and every other song on that album) will be set to 3 stars (even though typically I still haven't even listened to the other songs on the album yet).

Note that this is not the hollow or light stars that seem to get set based on an average of songs in the album. These are filled in stars.

I can go in and remove the ratings, but that's a lot to do when I've been listening to a lot of music.

so...

Is there a way to stop iTunes (or maybe it's the Music app on the iPhone) from automatically assigning these album ratings?

or is there a way to create a smart playlist that is based on just song rating and ignores album rating?

Thanks