Karen's Comments on the Scoring

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

Thank you Karen for jumping in on the Scoring. As I have said before, I have
never been involved in a Contest of this sort before. You have and your
experience is appreciated.

When I complained about the different "schemes" used by the various Judges
and the difficulty I had in matching some of the scores provided with those
provided by other judges, it had nothing to do with the personal favourites
of any particular Judge. It was more due to the fact that different people
gave me numbers which drew on completely different "scales", and I was faced
with the task of relatively quickly reconciling the "scales", getting things
ranked, and then posted to the web-site.

For ranking, the first thing which came to mind was to do it the way a
teacher adds up a student's individual test scores to arrive at an aggregate
score and I then divided that by the number of Judges who had participated
to arrive at an average. It wasn't "favouritism" on my part at all, nor any
attempt to "skew" the results. At the time I did it, I didn't have the
benefit of your experience in juried competitions.

After reading your post, where you ultimately ignore the actual "point
values" and rely instead on the relative ranking of the different entries, I
can see that this would tend to eliminate any such problems. Regardless of
the yardstick a particular Judge uses, if we rely on the relative order in
which they rank the entries, we should be able to come up with a consistent
final answer of who wins.

But it wasn't _me_ who insisted on a "point system", that just seemed to be
the concencus of the group. You are the one with the experience of Judging
and being involved in Contests. Most of the folks who were volunteer judges
made it very clear to me in their responses that they have never done
anything like this before and they were unsure of themselves in assigning
points to the images. I can't knock them for that, as I am in the same boat,
and am on just as shaky ground as they are here.

If you have a better, cleaner, simpler system, please step forward and
explain it. Or was your last post that system?

Thanks,

James Purchase
Toronto

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