Re: Mock Judging Results - Erik

["James Purchase" <jpurch@interlog.com>]

Erik wrote:

"Going back to the aquarium show scorecard approach, we could easily adapt
this to solve James' dilemna.  Take a *total* score of 100 points possible
for all criteria combined, then split it up based on percentage for each
criteria (30 points this, 20 points that...).  Then on the web forms, we
use radio buttons, drop-downs or sliders to select the score points (this
being the electronic equivalent of numbers circled on scorecards). I would
suggest *not* normalizing each criteria to the same max points, but rather
keep them appropriately weighted so the judges remember how important each
category is."

James responds - My biggest problem was not necessarily that different
people felt differently about the various entries, or that their scores
sometimes varied widely - this is in the realm of personal opinion and is to
be expected. But some judges (most, actually) gave me scores which indicated
that they had understood my possibly sketchy instructions, while others
seemed to have substituted other marking schemes and their numbers did not
correspond to anything I was expecting. In the actual Contest, if there were
say 200 entries and 10 Judges - if everyone followed their own whiles and
gave me numbers that I had to scratch my head over before they could be
plugged into a spreadsheet with everyone elses' results, I'd simply dump the
judge AND their scores. I'm doing enough work as it is, rather than inviting
more.

Your suggestion of web forms with radio buttons or some other such scheme
would probably solve that, but it would require that the Judge had Internet
access (which I suppose they all would anyway). Could a Pearl script or
relational database be interfaced with this sort of thing to capture and
collate this information so that human interraction can be kept to a minumum
once Judging is actually underway (like me having to manually receive
e-mails and cut and paste scores and comments into a spreadsheet program)?

>> Underwater Gardens - only natural materials allowed

>Uh, we've been here before.  I don't want to go here again.  I think
>everyone would be disqualified in this category.

Hahahahaha! As I recall, while we were "discussing" underwater gardening and
everyone here was telling me that they don't try to design aquascapes to
"themes" or "concepts", there was a thread on the APD about exactly that -
and there seemed to be a lot people who expressed an interest in being as
accurate as possible in their tanks.

I'm not bringing up "underwater gardens" to re-open old wounds - I'm just
trying to find a way of lessening or simplifying the amount of work that is
going to have to be done once entries start coming in. We should have _some_
idea of general categories tanks might fall into...... seems reasonable to
me.

James Purchase
Toronto


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