[AGA Contest] judge scoring...

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Fri, 21 May 2004, S. Hieber wrote:

> "Each judge will score the entries and assign a rank of
> First, Second, or Third to the entries that he or she
> scores highest, next highest and third highest
> respectively.  For each first place ranking by one of the
> judges, an entry is given 3 ranking points, 2 for second
> and 1 for third.  The entry with the most ranking points
> wins first, second most ranking points wins second, and
> thirdmost wins third."
> 
> Or does the entry with the most first-place rankings win
> first, etc.? So only those entries that got first place
> rankings can win first place?  See, it could go diff ways
> even with the same points, ranks, blah blah.

I changed the wording a little bit to what I think represents best what is
actually done.  The judge doesn't actually do ANY rankings.  They just
score.  From there it's actually tabulated by computer automatically.  
The computer averages ALL rankings, not just 1st, 2nd and 3rd, and I pull
the top three average scores from this.  When you look a little below
this, it becomes noise, so just like the raw scores, the other ranks are
not revealed to the public site... all it would do is piss people off.  
Heck, Amano's contest pisses me off because they do that "global ranking" 
that is clearly noise.

The reason for using all the raw rankings in the tabulation is because
sometimes the 1st placer is actually an entry that placed consistently #4
for all judges, while all the entries that each judge separately thought
was #1 might have been panned by the other judges.  It's a strange side
effect, but ends up being the only thing the judges can agree on.  Karen
commented on this that the really daring tanks (c.f.  Ricky Cain's
plantless foreground last year) don't win first because they have as many
people who really despise it as are fanatically in love with it.  To make
up for this, we give honorable mentions -- I think I made sure we had an
HM for *every* entry that at least judge gave a 1st place ranking.

> I understand. Maybe most folks don't care how we deal with
> the points -- Just seems like we should say how it done
> even if, maybe especially if, we don't show the actual math
> afterwards. No need to show the man behind the curtain but
> we should say what man and what curtain will be used.

Well, we do say what we do.  It's definitely right there.  But if it takes 
several e-mail iterations to get this across, it's clearly not going to be 
explainable in a paragraph on the website.  Maybe if we had a special 
"tutorial" page, but that hardly seems necessary.  To tell the truth, I 
think you're the first one who's asked since 2000. :)

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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