Hamilton Shares His Thoughts on Judging System

Theatregirl1122 said:

The other thing that I have a problem with is that, if you have a clean take-off, great air possition, rotate a quad, and then fall, you get 5.0 points. If you have a sloppy take off, bad air position, manage to rotate a quad and then fall, you still get 5.0 points. Is it wierd to say that there should be some way to make a fall on a poorly executed jump worth less than a fall on an otherwise well executed jump?

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That's the fall penalty for any jump -- there is no compensation for an entire rink-length one-footed multi-turn step sequence into the jump, vaulting three feet in the air, clearing 10 feet from start to finish, or having perfect technique in the air. If you fall, you get zero credit for anything extra.

I think the issue is that the value for a fall for a quad toe is 5 points. Under 6.0, technically, a fall on a quad was worth the same as a double. Since there was no specific point values, that was interpretive, but it would be possible to set up the value of a fall to be the value of a jump two levels down, or 1.3 points for a fall on a quad toe and a fall on a throw quad salchow could earn the same as a throw double salchow. Falls on triples could be downgraded to single jumps. Because novice and juniors still perform a number of doubles, they could come up with a minimal amount for a fall on a double (or the jump could not count toward the number of jumping passes in the LP.) The one point penalty could be kept for all other elements, where falls are rare.

Mathman said:

Hockeyfan, your point #4 is quite subtle. I will watch for that in the future.

Point #3, I'm not so sure about. The rating scale has to accommodate skaters from beginners to champions. If someone placing 9th in the Midwest Sectional gets 4.25 in skating skills, and Shizuka Arakawa gets 8.25, I don't see where else you are going to put Irina and Sasha except 8.00 and 7.75.

MM

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But that's just using the PCS like 6.0 onkly instead of giving 5.6, 5.7, 5.8 and 5.9s, they're giving out 7, 7.25, 7.5, 7.75 and 8.0...i thought (and maybe i've misunderstood) that each PCS cateogory got a mark out of 10 for thepercentage of time in the program that the skater demonstrates that skill, so for choreography, if the skater has a beautifully choreographed program with tiny nuances throughout the program that are only broken when doing a big element like a jump or a spin then you could say the choreography was present for 90% of the program and therefore the skater get 9.0 in choreography.

It looks like amny people (including the judges) are just looking at it as the comparative scoring that 6.0 was.

Ant

Mathman said:

BTW, if the OAC disagrees with the judgment of the majority of the judging panel, they can expand the "corridor" as they deem appropriate.

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Anything to ensure there is no bad publicity but ONLY if there is a rumpus going on.

About "opinions," I have to admit I don't trust them very much. Facts are better, IMHO.

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I agree with or disagree with opinions. It's the nature of forums.

I can understand that the judges scores are their opinions and they are 'facts' in the final scheme of things. But they are certainly opinions in that they do not agree with the same numbers. If they were 'facts' they would all be in unisom.

It seems there is no reason to have a forum other than to accept whatever the judges' results or their details are, and fans should just be happy or sad with these results.

I would like to read more opinions by skaters than judges, but they have a code of silence.

Actually, I do think that the ISU follows through on its evaluative procedures. It would be better if they published the results (maybe they do, somewhere in the labyrinthe of all these "Communications"). It is to the clear and certain the advantage of the ISU to weed out incompetent and biased judging if they can. Why wouldn't they follow the prcedures that they labored so hard to come up with? MM

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I continue to be a skeptic here. Is that toe tapper still around? But then CoP has edged out some cheating, I agree. As for ineptness, I don't thing this evaluative procedure can deal with it without insulting the Federation of the inept one. No, I'm afraid that's to remain secret, if it actually happens.

Joe

hockeyfan228 said:

I think it's perfectly reasonable to give Arakawa 8.25, Slutskaya 7.5, and Cohen 6 in skating skills.

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I guess my question, then, is this. If there is a gap of 2.25 points between Arakawa and Cohen, there must be an equally large gap between Cohen and, say, Idora Hegel. So Hegel gets a 3.75.

But Suzie Q. from Peoria, competing in her first senior event, is even worse, so she gets 1.50. So where does that leave her little sister, skating in the novice division?

Joe, to me, the trouble with opinions is that people seldom bring any facts to the table to support them. For myself, I never figured that anyone cared much about what my opinion is. (Numbers, on the other hand -- now we're getting somewhere! )

Ant, I think it is quite clear that the judges are still stuck in 6.0 mode as far as the PCSs are concerned. In their minds they give out ordinals, then they adjust the points to make it come out that way.

I am undecided whether this is a good thing or a bad. Figure skating is a judged sport. The New Judging System, in part, tries to vacate this. But not, I think, with overwhelming success.

MM

Mathman - Posters have opnions on what they see. You come in with the detailed RESULTS, and tell them in a nice way that the Judges are always correct and if you disagree, your opinion is wrong.

What I am driving at is that I do not think you can see a competition and have any feelings for it until after you've seen what the judges have said. It's almost like you are afraid of being wrong, and it's safe to see what the judges have ruled before you make any comments.

I know playing with the numbers is fun. I do su doku.

Joe

Slightly off-topic

Heres what I don't understand, and it's not a CoP problem, in fact it's probably better with CoP than 6.0. Why don't you (particularily in lower-level and basic skills competitions) get back your sheets from the judges saying why they scored you how they did? In my opinion, I don't know how you are supposed to improve if you don't know why the judges gave you a certain score. I guess the reason this is an issue for me is that I'm a dancer, and we are always given our score sheets from the judges so we know exactly where the problems are and what needs to be fixed.

hockeyfan228 said:

That's the fall penalty for any jump -- there is no compensation for an entire rink-length one-footed multi-turn step sequence into the jump, vaulting three feet in the air, clearing 10 feet from start to finish, or having perfect technique in the air. If you fall, you get zero credit for anything extra.

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My issue is not that you should get more points for a well executed quad with fall, it's that you should get less points for a poorly executed quad with fall. I know it's odd to say that this person's quad fall is better than that one. However, if some people feel that it is harder to rotate a good quad than it is to land a good tripple, is it still harder to rotate a sloppy quad than it is to rotate a good tripple.

Mathman said:

I guess my question, then, is this. If there is a gap of 2.25 points between Arakawa and Cohen, there must be an equally large gap between Cohen and, say, Idora Hegel. So Hegel gets a 3.75.

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Why? Idora Hegel's skating skills might be 5.75. Galina Maniachenko's would, rightly, be higher than Cohen's; she's one of the world's masters of one-footed skating and has had fantastic interpretation to boot. What does she get? 5's across the board. The Cantu sisters have fantastic performance/execution and interpretation in their programs, up there with the top 10 ladies in the World. What do they get? 4-5's across the board. The whole point of breaking down the PCS is to be able to say, that was an 8 program in choreography with 4 in transitions and 5 in skating skills. The point is to give credit for the strengths of the competitors.

Mathman said:

But Suzie Q. from Peoria, competing in her first senior event, is even worse, so she gets 1.50. So where does that leave her little sister, skating in the novice division?

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Why is Suzie Q necessarily worse or that much worse? I saw Canadian Junior and Senior Nationals last year, and there were women with fantastic skating skills, but little interpretation skills and no choreography to speak of. I saw terrific interpreters with skating skills that would place in top 10 at US Nationals, but who had no jumps and got bupkus for the PCS in which they excelled.

Under 6.0, those skaters got 2.X in the pre score. Why would it be an issue if they earned 1.5 to get 1.5?

Plushenko is not better than everyone in all PCS. Matthew Savoie had far more transitions, but Matthew Savoie would not have overtaken Plushenko overall on the basis of having one PCS three points higher than Plushenko. Buttle had the best choreography for LP's of any man's skater in my opinion, but he would not have overtaken Plushenko on the basis of a choregraphy mark and a higher transitions mark. I would have made the argument using Arakawa as an example, but I can't think of any choregraphy from last year among the women's that was great shakes or any better than re-vamped Turandot, although Wilson's reworking of R&J for Cohen was strong. But her interpretation was a bit less strong than Cohen's, for example, in my opinion, and a couple of other lower-ranked skaters, but that wouldn't have put her behind Cohen.

The point is that it is a rare skater in a rare competition that exceeds the entire field in all PCS.

Mathman said:

So who won? Judges #1, 2, 3, 6,11 and 12 favored Joubert in this part of the program, while judges #5, 8, 9, and 10 went with Lambiel, with two ties (judges #4 and 7).

Who won? Lambiel, 156.58 to 156.47. (Over and out.)

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Not unlike the 6.0 system. Is it?

It's not the CoP theory that is the problem. It is the practice of the CoP.

Joe

Theatregirl1122 said:

My issue is not that you should get more points for a well executed quad with fall, it's that you should get less points for a poorly executed quad with fall. I know it's odd to say that this person's quad fall is better than that one. However, if some people feel that it is harder to rotate a good quad than it is to land a good tripple, is it still harder to rotate a sloppy quad than it is to rotate a good tripple.

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Not unlike that one flutz is better than another flutz?

It seems to me a fall is a fall and a flutz is a flutz. Why judge the errrors?

Joe

Oh, I absolutely agree with Theatregirl's idea, Joe. Remember, if you fall on a quad you still get 5.0 points. Theatregirl is saying, OK, fair enough, you were penalized 4.0 points for that mistake.

But if you fall and have an improper take-off and have an ungainly postion in the air, and if your fall is so bad that it disrupts the flow of the program, then you should lose more points than just the four.

This seems perfectly sensible to me.

The same with a flutz. If you flutz you should lose some points. If you fall on your flutz you should lose even more points. Everything you do wrong, that should be reflected in the point total for the element.

MM

hockeyfan228 said:

Idora Hegel's skating skills might be 5.75. Galina Maniachenko's would, rightly, be higher than Cohen's; she's one of the world's masters of one-footed skating and has had fantastic interpretation to boot. What does she get? 5's across the board...

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Great post, Hockeyfan!

But...I think you nailed it before when you said that the reason the judges don't really judge what they see, and why they don't really pay attention to the criteria in the rules -- why they continue to rely on protocol judging (Plushenko is the best skater, so he automatically gets 8.25 across the board in PCSs) -- is that they don't want to lose control of the results of the competition.

If they just assigned points in the way that the rule book prescribes, who knows who might end up on top of the podium? The judges would become irrelevant.

Maybe it will be possible some time in the future (when this generation of judges dies out) to change the mind set that has guided the sport for a century: the judges decide who they like the best, and give that person the highest scores.

But I'm not holding my breath.

MM

Mathman said:

Oh, I absolutely agree with Theatregirl's idea, Joe. Remember, if you fall on a quad you still get 5.0 points. Theatregirl is saying, OK, fair enough, you were penalized 4.0 points for that mistake.

But if you fall and have an improper take-off and have an ungainly postion in the air, and if your fall is so bad that it disrupts the flow of the program, then you should lose more points than just the four.

This seems perfectly sensible to me.

The same with a flutz. If you flutz you should lose some points. If you fall on your flutz you should lose even more points. Everything you do wrong, that should be reflected in the point total for the element.

MM

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MM - I do know what happens with a Flutz and it is judged without a fall. the space between the skating leg and the toe off is how it is judged. In essence it is an acceptable jump by the judges, and some skaters have better flutzes than others. You see I am thinking how wrong that rationale is, not just accepting it. That's the difference between us.

I would be in favor of making it a legitimate jump but you would argue it's against the rules since it is not listed in goes. Yeah.

The exceptions to the Quad for me make it a girlie sport. And YES, I know the rules for the errors.

.26 landing on a jump is a downgrade.

And there is never a reason to question a Caller or his yes men.

Joe

Joesitz said:

The exceptions to the Quad for me make it a girlie sport.

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What exeptions are you referring to?

Wasn't there something in the threads anyhow, that any combos in Quads are exempt from the Zayak Rule? There was some discussion on these points recently about some errors do not apply to quads. Maybe I'm reading wrongly.

Joe

Oh yes, that's quite right about the Zayak rule. A quad attempt that is downgraded to a triple counts as a triple in scoring but as a quad for Zayak purposes.

The combo-that-wasn't-a-combo rule, I think applies to triple/triple (also to triple/double) combos as well as to quad combos.

I don't know whether these rules make the sport more wussy, but I have to admit that on paper they look ridiculously inconsistent.

And yet, there is a certain consistency to their inconsistency. The ISU is trying not to let an early mistake on one element cause further deductions on correctly perfromed elements later in the program.

BTW, Joe, when I post quoting ISU Communications, judging protocols, etc., that doesn't mean that I necessarily think the iSU is right. I am just trying to understand the rules myself.

I have found, however, that most of the objections to the NJS that come up on message boards have been considered by the framers of the NJS. To me, these documents show a considerable attempt to compromise among many different points of view. The result may be a hybrid mutt, but it wasn't thrown together thoughlessly, IMHO.

MM

Mathman said:

Oh yes, that's quite right about the Zayak rule. A quad attempt that is downgraded to a triple counts as a triple in scoring but as a quad for Zayak purposes.

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Isn't this because doubles don't count towards the Zayak rule, and a downgrade triple counts as a double in scoring?

Does a triple attempt that is downgraded to a double still count as a triple for Zayak purposes?

What if you did triple flip/double toe, then a solo triple flip attempt downgraded to a double. Could you throw in another triple flip at the end to make up for it?

Mathman said:

I have found, however, that most of the objections to the NJS that come up on message boards have been considered by the framers of the NJS. To me, these documents show a considerable attempt to compromise among many different points of view. The result may be a hybrid mutt, but it wasn't thrown together thoughlessly, IMHO.

MM

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Maybe it wasn't thrown together thoughtlessly but it certainly was implemented thoughtlessly. The CoP should never have been rushed through in time for the next Olympics - it should have been trialled in a back room at every competition alongside 6.0 and the results made public and people grilled about it. Ask the caller and his team to justify their rulings and make all of the tweaks to the code and finally implement it properly next season.

The CoP didn't have as much thought as it should have done and that was for one reason, $peedy didn't want figure skating to be kicked out of the Olympics and covering up his cronies fixes by throwing people off the scent withteh new judging system was the only way he thought he could do it.

Ant