2017 JGP Brisbane Ladies FS

[largeman]

I am the only one who sees bolded as completely ridiculous? You're judging, it's not about your "style" or "preference". You do your job competently or, if you don't, you get dismissed like in any job.

Am I the only one (well, besides eppen, who clarified their point really well in the above reply) who thinks "judging" inherently and by default involves at least some degree of personal style and preference? If that's so completely ridiculous, why does it even take nine judges to score a competition fairly?

 

[Tolstoj]

The Australian judge’s scores in the ladies are very much within the same range as the others, just on the lower end. In the FS for the Russian girls, she is in the “average/above average” range (5.00-6.75) together with judge nr 2 and the rest went with the lower part of the “good” range (7.00-7.75). The Russian judges in the singles events chose to use the higher end of the scale. Howver, all these judges were consistent in their scoring, there are no surprises along the way, no inexplicable vacillation between.

They all clearly work within the ISU scoring system, but choose to use the different ends of the scale available to them. That does not make any of them blatantly incorrect or incompetent, does it?

Personally i'm against this way of judging each skater with the same range of scores (such a small range), because it's unfair for the skaters who works more on the components, and a clear advantage for the skater who is simply not able to put all these difficult moves in and out an element.

For example Trusova's transitions in the SP were clearly better than the rest of the field, things like the split jump followed by the steps into the 3f-3lo, or the cantilever into the rippon lutz is something you don't see even in seniors ladies, so giving her less than a 6 in transitions is simply inaccurate, even less than other skaters that don't have all these transitions is unfair.

And when the comparison is this level of transitions versus almost nothing i think the gap should be more than 0.5 / 0.75. Otherwise why bother?

Just compare Trusova's transitions (5.75 from judge no.1, 6.39 overall)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtXMAr4mMk4

vs Takino's transitions (5.5 from judge no.1 / 6.0)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU6RfpCR9Lw
(no transitions out of her jumps, no transitions in and out for the first two spins and actually a little stumble out of the second one, very minimal and simple steps going into the combo and solo jump which has the required steps)

(In her case i'm sure she will get higher components down the line, it's more a complaint in general)

I'm also very much against all these unspoken rules which an older skater should receive higher PCS, or PCS in juniors should stay low no matter what. Why?

It's not always true that an older skater skates better than a younger one, there are tons of examples of old skaters who keeps their terrible skating skills, they don't have difficult transitions,... and sometimes you see junior skaters doing programs actually more sophisticated than most of the seniors skaters. Why can't you reward them?

 

[Sam-Skwantch]

The Australian judge was really disappointing...hopefully being that far off of the mark will be looked at by the ISU. Not going to be holding my breath though

 

[Ender]

I think some judges don't want to create too big gap among the skaters in every component.

 

[Sam-Skwantch]

What a fun debut for Sasha! She seemed so excited to get out there and take her mark. Amazingly strong for being so ridiculously tiny too. I think this program will improve too by seasons end. Hopefully she can make a nice long season of it

 

[eppen]

Indeed, if judging was just like eg grading multiple choice tests with only one correct answer per question, it could be done by a machine?

I also dislike the block judging - I'm sure there could be more variation between the scores for different categories in PCS. The scoring system works also as a reference to the skaters on what they are good at and what they need to work on, and maybe a more varied scorecard could serve them better.

The Australian judge was really disappointing...hopefully being that far off of the mark will be looked at by the ISU. Not going to be holding my breath though

The highest score spread was in Trusova's FS and it was 2.5 points between the Australian and Russian scores (5.25-7.75) - and here I ask seriously who was more wrong, the Australian judge for her moderate approach or the Russian judge for giving out high scores like candy? When you scroll down the list, the other judges get closer to the Australian and the difference between the lowest and highest score is below 2.0 points.

If you plow through judges score sheets, it becomes soon apparent that a "normal" score spread tends to be below 2 points, but even at top level the judges can have very different opinions. Eg at Helsinki worlds, Boyang Jin's programs got a point spread of close to 3.0 points (6.75-9.75 and 6.75-9.50), even Carolina Kostner got a point spread of 6.75-9.50 for her SP! Kolyada and Chen also got very wide ranges, and so on. My favourite score spread ever is from Sochi team event where one of the judges gave Plushenko 4.50 for his transitions in the SP when the top transistions score was 9.25 (his top PCS score was 9.75 making the score spread a whopping 5.25 points)! In the FS he got 6.25-9.25 for transitions, the highest score he got was 9.75 making the score spread 3.50 points.

That was just a few random examples from two major competitions, but even without checking I'm pretty sure it would be possible to find a 2,5-3 point spread at least once in most score sheets in singles skating. In other words, I don't think the ISU was too shocked or upset about what the Australian judge was doing.

It would be a good exercise for every skating fan to go through the score sheets for a couple competitions to try and understand what is normal and what is unusual. It is not that difficult, the score sheets are readily available on the ISU website, you mostly just need a bit of time. Check for example the highest/lowest individual scores, maybe also which judge gives the highest/lowest scores, for 2016-7 season you can even do it truly by judge/country and it is worth checking out for possible national bias (both in a positive and negative manner, for example scoring your own skater high and their most important opponents low), etc.

E

 

[puremagic]

Indeed, if judging was just like eg grading multiple choice tests with only one correct answer per question, it could be done by a machine?

I also dislike the block judging - I'm sure there could be more variation between the scores for different categories in PCS. The scoring system works also as a reference to the skaters on what they are good at and what they need to work on, and maybe a more varied scorecard could serve them better.

The highest score spread was in Trusova's FS and it was 2.5 points between the Australian and Russian scores (5.25-7.75) - and here I ask seriously who was more wrong, the Australian judge for her moderate approach or the Russian judge for giving out high scores like candy? When you scroll down the list, the other judges get closer to the Australian and the difference between the lowest and highest score is below 2.0 points.

Moderate approach from the Australian judge and scores like candy from the Russian. I see. Now I understand. See, guys? Now it's all clear! But, seriously, what a pathetic way to try to explain your own nonsense.

First, you shift the blame to Russian judge, just because her one score for interpretation of the music is higher on 0.25 than other judge.
Then, about national bias - you just discovered America. Congratulations. But it absolutely doesn't touch the main topic.

OK, let's take other judges more less close to Australian and Russian:

Judge n.2 from Taipei and Judge n.5 from USA - in Australian camp. (Hardly, but okay)

And:

Judge n.1 from Hong Kong
Judge n.3 from Canada
Judge n.4 from Japan
Judge n.8 from Mexico
Judge n.9 from Turkey

in Russian camp.

Let's compare maximum handicamp betweeen judges in Russian case. As I said above only in interpetation of the music we can see the max gap by 0.25 with national bias. And minimum handicamp between judges in Australian case - 0.75. Average it's about 1-1,5 points.

If follow your logiс the five judges preferred to give candy to Sasha too. (and I want to give her candy too! )

Because you can see 7.50 for transitions from judge number 1, which higher than even Russian marks 7.25.

And as many love here to say, it's not judges from CIS or other countries where Russia transfer its "corruption" judges.

See, just like this, in usual discussion about strange marks from Australian judge we again somehow came to the Russian judge. Well, nothing new...

 

[eppen]

Oh puremagic, I mostly used the Russian judge as her scores were at the opposite end of the scale for Trusova (and Guliakova) from the Australian. As such scoring consistently high is obviously as acceptable as scoring low, but in recent years most complaints on PCS have been on overscoring, so I find it amusing that the complaints here are on the judge who gave low scores. The Australian judge scored everyone else also very low (until the 10th skater in the FS hers was the lowest score for everyone). She was consistent if nothing else, difficult for me to see corruption there.

National bias does exist, it's been around for a long time and everybody seems to be doing it. Many a scientific article have been written about it...

Now that it is possible to connect the judges and countries to their scores without problems, I did a bit of work on the senior GP series last fall. What came out from that very small amount of evidence was that the national bias seems to work mostly in such a way that the judges from the skaters country tend to give a positive PCS score to their skater (preferably in such a way that it is not the top outlier that gets tossed away in the trimmed mean procedure, but stays in the calculation to boost the skaters score a bit). Then you a give a low score to the most important opponent of your skater (again trying to avoid being the lowest). This is very, very common and visible in almost every scoresheet.

Based on what could be seen in the senior score data, the fact that the Russian judge gave the overall highest scores for Trusova and Guliakova is a form of national bias. She just was not very good at it and her scores got mostly tossed out. She did not score most other skaters very high though, so her scale was not on that high level as eg compared to the Russian judge in the men's event who was the high scorer to almost everyone - she was using definitely using the high end of the scale like the Australian was using a low scale in the ladies.

Can you see the difference based on this explanation? The Australian scored everyone low - even the Australians! - the Russian judged her own skaters very positively, but did not reward others in a similarly high scale. You can look at one case and come up with all kinds of explanations to it, but in the end you have to look at the big picture and how each judge works in that competition.

And just to make it clear: I am in no way blaming ONLY the Russian judge of applying this kind of national bias in their scoring of PCS because really just about every judge from every nation does it - in the Skate America even our Australian low scorer Jelinek gave a remarkably high score to Brendan Kerry compared to her other scores!

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this - on the one hand, this is understandable human behaviour, supporting your own, but in the spirit of fair and unbiased judging not so good. But as everyone does it, mathematically it probably just means that the low and high scores given with negative/positive national bias scores cancel each other out even when they are calculated into the final score and not tossed out.

E

 

[[email protected]]

Whatever, there are no issues with Trusova. She has 197, she has the second spot where there might no presence of Australian judges who are famous for sometimes questionable scores like last year Japan JGP. Then an Australian judge gave Alisa Fedichkina 4.75 for transitions and 5.0 - 5.25 for everything else while her marks to the Japanese were in 7s and 8s.

The issue is with Gulyakova. She was somewhat lowballed by judges and even with 181 and silver her chances to skate again are not as good as if she was scored more properly like 185 - 186.