Re: [AGA Contest] judge scoring...

["S. Hieber" <shieber@yahoo.com>]

--- Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote:
>> 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. 


Well, there's another way to go.

> When you look a
> little below
> this, it becomes 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.

There are voting/counting methods that deal with this
phenomenon in diff ways, some that usbdue it, some that
emphasize it.
> 
> > 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. :)

Figures -- it's just me. But that is extraordinary when you
think about it. With all the noise each year over how the
judging occurs and how it should have occurred, no one
considers how the scores might actually matter -- they
assume, like voters in federal elections that a vote is a
vote and a winner is a winner and it's only the subjective
valuation of the voter that makes a diff.

*I'll give it another shot: Each judge scores each entry.
The computer coverts each judge's score for an entry into a
rank (1st  for highest score from that judge, 2nd for next
highest, etc.) All of the Judge Rankings for an entry are
averaged and the average represents the final value for the
entry. The larger the final value, the higher the final
ranking within a class. *



Anyway, what was missing from the discussion, in sequence
was, rescoring of judges' scores (i.e, Borda counting or
secondary scoring) and averaging of the secondary scores.

An opposite way to go would be to count the most 1st place
votes as 1st place. the most 1st and 2nd place votes as
2nd, the most 1st 2nd and 3rd place votes as third. Only
entries that were ranked 1st could win 1st.

Or one could go pair wise -- try to get the judges to sit
still for that! I think the winner last year might have won
under only one way of counting, the way we count, the
Averaged Borda count. :-)


sh

=====
-  -   -   -   -   -   -   -
She Wrote the book on low maintenance aquatic gardening!
Diana Walstad, author of _Ecology of the Planted Aquarium_
Meet her at  - The Fifth AGA Annual Convention
Details & Registration at www.aquatic-gardeners.org & www.gwapa.org


        
                
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