Mathman,
I understand what you're saying. Under the CoP, random sampling of the panel of judges statistically has no greater effect on the outcome than the original draw of the panel of judges. This is because the variability in the judges' marks, as pointed out by Sandra Loosemore, will in effect cause any panel of judges to produce a different result under the CoP.
I understand what you're saying. Under the CoP, random sampling of the panel of judges statistically has no greater effect on the outcome than the original draw of the panel of judges. This is because the variability in the judges' marks, as pointed out by Sandra Loosemore, will in effect cause any panel of judges to produce a different result under the CoP.
However, the ordinal system will often produce the same results even in a close competition with any given panel of judges (barring bloc judging). There will be some error within each sample (ex. 7-2, 6-3), but the sampling distribution WILL approach the mean (9 judges unanimous). Under the CoP, any sample of judges will NOT belong to the same distribution as another. This is because of the subjectivity of the component marks (which are scored on an absolute scale, contributing to error), and because of the huge variability between judges in the component marks, as discussed by Sandra Loosemore. Therefore the results of any competition under the CoP cannot be said to be meaningfully representative of anything but the given set of judges on the panel, and only those whose scores are counted.If you draw a sample from a large population, then of course the results may be different if you choose sample X than if you choose sample Y. This is true for any statistic that can be extracted from a sample, whether it is the sum of a lot of component scores (CoP) or whether it is an average ordinal placement (OBO, for instance).