Thanks for the explanation
@gkelly
I am still questioning myself... Do you think some skaters from the 6.0 era would have done better in IJS in terms of PCS, considering the style of judging and skating of today. I suggested that Elvis would have done better with PCS under the IJS because often, he skated a strong technical content with a lot of pizzazz but he was far from the "artistic" style of skaters who seemed to earn top presentation scores under 6.0. For those skaters, often the second mark would be higher than the first. However, with Elvis, it's almost automatic that the second mark was lower than the first.
Hard to say.
With IJS, the TES and PCS don't have much to do with each other. Judges aren't focused on balancing them against each other -- that's something that happens mathematically in the computer calculations.
Under the current scale of values and top jump content and the current PCS factors, anyone who does multiple quads successfully is going to have much higher TES than PCS.
With 1990s jump content, PCS can more easily determine the outcome.
(Or for 2020s women if they had the men's PCS factors.)
With 6.0, the actual scores weren't meaningful, just suggestive. But depending on skate order and how well everyone skated, judges might have had to give a higher second mark to a performance they thought was stronger in technical content than presentation, or vice versa, just to slot later skaters into the final placement they thought they deserved in that program.
In IJS judges don't have that level of control over the final results -- they're not told what levels skaters earn on their non-jump elements, and even if there were, there are too many different pieces that go into TES calculations for judges to keep track of them all and figure out where they need to score skater C to slot them between skaters A and B. They're supposed to just judge each element and each component on its own merits. Much easier to do that than to keep track of whether an edge call or a +REP on a jump is going to change the base value and factor that into estimating how far apart the TES might be for two skaters.
Do judges intentionally try to raise the PCS of great jumpers whose component skills are not as much of a strength them? Or do the judges evaluate the PCS of strong jumpers who are also pretty good at everything else, just not
quite as good as they are at jumps, or as the very top exceptional PCS skaters in the world at that time are in PCS, as not much lower than those very best PCS skaters, taking into account the whole field?
I don't know -- I'm not in their heads.
Did 1990s judges reward things like body line (a weaker area for Stojko and Ito) more highly than 2020s judges? Probably, at least some of them.
Taking into account that even if we asked the most expert 2020s judges to rescore 1996 Worlds, they too would be hampered by trying to judge the skating skills on video, even if they had seen most of those skaters live on different occasions back in the day. But they would now look at the components with IJS eyes. So if they were going to judge those old programs by IJS, we'd expect them to value everything that's valued now.
So a skater like Stojko could be rewarded in each component for the areas in that components criteria where he was strong, and less so for the areas where he was not so strong. Many of which would vary somewhat from one performance to another.
Same for his competitors who might have tended to get higher second marks back in the 6.0 system.
But with few quads and few spins or steps above level B or level 1, hardly any of those skaters would earn TES that exceed the maximum PCS available for that program (50 for men's SPs, 100 for free skates), so the very best performances by all the strong skaters would likely be higher on PCS than TES, the opposite of what's the case today.
Would a strong 2026 jumper get a lowered second mark in 6.0 while right now, they still get a score very close to the top artistic skaters based on the quality of their jumps etc ? Maybe it's a debate for another thread.
Feel free to start one.
If we asked experienced 6.0 judges, either time travelers or judges who were trained under the old system and are still around, to judge today's skaters by 6.0, would they give skaters like Malinin and Shaidorov and Grassl second marks lower than their first marks? I think it would depend on the particular performance . . . and what scores the judges had already given previous skaters, who else they needed to leave room for later in the skate order. It could probably go either way.
Skaters who are doing quads but consistently earning PCS in the low 7s or 6s . . . probably yes.
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