ISU evaluation of questionable judging

sk8rdad said:

ITA with gkelly, he is obviously better at debating the points than I am. It would also go so far as to say it should be required that judges be named when disciplined at least for serious or repeat cases. Part of the assessment process is to identify judges who need remedial training to improve their judging. And while I am being somewhat of a devils advocate here by taking the anonymous judging side (yes I would prefer not to have non-anonymous judging) but I feel that many judges are wrongly accused of cheating regardless of the facts (guilty until proven innocent).

Even in your letter scenario you assumed that the one out of kilter mark was the cheating judge but if you were a believer in block judging the reverse could be true where the -2 GOE was the judge not involved in holding up a skater. Not the most realistic scenario but I hope you get my point.

If the ISU is more transparent with the investigative process then yes the judges don't need to be anonymous because the general fan base would be accusing all judges of being cheats. It is unfortunate that a few have given the whole a bad name.

Click to expand...

Maybe we just ended up trying to out devil's advocate each other

I just have an extreme reaction to anonymous judging and could not believe that people were actually advocating it.

In hindsight my one -2 GOE point actually ended up working against my argument since it would far more likely be a human error than anything else. It was borne out of my frustration when you see an uncharacteristic low ball GOE that seems to stand out, though i have seen a +3 that made me but i can't recall where. It frustrates that i can't just look at the protocol and say "oh i get it, it was the judge from the skater's country that gave that. "

Also gkelly has made her usual good points about how seating position of the judges, angles, things the udges are particularly looking out for can all affect GOE and that a mark isn't necessarily "wrong".

I accept all that and I do forget sometimes that judges are fallible humans too. I also know that their job is exceptionally difficult especially if you try for even one skater to mark everything as they must (which i did all of once before i gave up ) it is tough and the majority do get it right most of the time (which i did say earlier).

Anyway it's all good! We've got to talk about something before the Olympics!

Ant

antmanb said:

Maybe we just ended up trying to out devil's advocate each other

I just have an extreme reaction to anonymous judging and could not believe that people were actually advocating it.

In hindsight my one -2 GOE point actually ended up working against my argument since it would far more likely be a human error than anything else. It was borne out of my frustration when you see an uncharacteristic low ball GOE that seems to stand out, though i have seen a +3 that made me but i can't recall where. It frustrates that i can't just look at the protocol and say "oh i get it, it was the judge from the skater's country that gave that. "

Also gkelly has made her usual good points about how seating position of the judges, angles, things the udges are particularly looking out for can all affect GOE and that a mark isn't necessarily "wrong".

I accept all that and I do forget sometimes that judges are fallible humans too. I also know that their job is exceptionally difficult especially if you try for even one skater to mark everything as they must (which i did all of once before i gave up ) it is tough and the majority do get it right most of the time (which i did say earlier).

Anyway it's all good! We've got to talk about something before the Olympics!

Ant

Click to expand...

That's what makes it fun. By take the exterme points of view all the permutations and good and bad gets hashed out and out of it maybe some useful stuff that might actually do some good. Maybe some ISU lurker will see what we want and actually do something about it. I would much rather debate this and the endless debate on if or when Sasha will pull from US Nats.

sk8rdad said:

ITA with gkelly, he is obviously better at debating the points than I am.

Click to expand...

Gkelly is a he?

I was thinking Grace. Oops!

sk8rdad said:

ITA with gkelly, he is obviously better at debating the points than I am.

Click to expand...

I have learned that gkelly can totally anihilate anyone on the board in debate, -- especially me -- simply by being rational when everyone else is ranting.

gkelly said:

If you want disagreeing with the results based on gut feeling and singling out individual officials to disagree with to be part of the fun, then you want bad judging...

But you can't have it both ways. If the judging is totally clean, is it appropriate to be booing honest judges just because it's fun to boo?

Click to expand...

To me, the fun of booing was not to disrespect the judges. Not at all. It is a little game where the audience can pretend that it is the skaters (the good guys) against the mean old judges. That pretty girl just skated her heart out and this mean old judge gave her a 5.1! By booing the mark, the audience gets to show support for the skater: "You did great in my book, kid -- don't mind those grumpy-gusses sitting over there in the judges' box."

It's like at a football game where the hometown hero runs 60 yards for a touchdown, then it gets called back because of a penalty. You boo the result of the play. But you are not saying the referee made an incorrect ruling, it's more like saying to the player, "that's OK, we've got your back, you'll get 'em next time!"

gkelly said:

See, I think this is a problem for a technical sport.

Click to expand...

To me, the main problem is that correct figure skating judging is a robotic checking off of detailed technical points that the audience is oblivious to. I do not have any solution. But it does make the sport less interesting to the spectators. when they can't tell who is winning or losing or why.

For example, Joubert versus Buttle at 2008 Worlds long program. I thought Joubert had the biggest technical fireworks, but Buttle was smooth and graceful. When the scorers came up, Buttle had creamed Joubert in the tech score, but Joubert received higher program component scores. This just rubbed my nose in the fact that I know nothing about the ISU scoring system. (I am tempted to say, "boooo.")

Spun Silver said:

I was thinking Grace. Oops!

Click to expand...

Not Gene? (I don't know whether gkelly is a man or a lady. I bet he/she won't say. )

There is not necessarily a direct correspondence between my sex and that of the referent of my screen name.

Spun Silver said:

Gkelly is a he?

I was thinking Grace. Oops!

Click to expand...

I actually don't know which gender gkelly is. I tend to be a lazy SOB when it comes to typing so if I have a choice of he, she or he/she guess which I choose.

If the forum as a standard let me know and I will happily comply, resistance is futile.

Hsuhs said:

There's a chance it doesn't. The scores need to almost make no sense to end up outside the "corridor". Like, for instance, those fixed, perfectly identical sets of pcs in CoR from 2 judges - they were not outside the "corridor", nevertheless that was some shameless blatant cheating. Has that situation been addressed? I don't know.

Click to expand...

That is a good point.
Beside that, I have a question - what happens if a judge was way out of line and was not able to justify his/her marks? If these marks influenced the results, will there be a correction of the outcome of the competition? I guess not, and I see it as a major problem too.