Yeah, let's just brainstorm how things might work.
So what is their area of expertise.
I'm sure some judges who established their judging careers under 6.0 already feel that some of their expertise has been taken away from them and that power given to the tech panel and to whoever makes up the scale of values.
That's one reason why judges watched practices under 6.0 and may still with IJS. But skaters don't always do full runthroughs in practices. And judges won't be equally familiar with all the skaters from previous events.
And of course skaters don't always perform the same way in competition that they do in practice, or at one event the same way they did at the previous event.
So although judges might use whatever prior knowledge of this program they have to come up with a rough idea of the general range of PCS a skater might deserve for that program, I don't think it's possible to set a firm base value in advance. A base value based on difficulty of the choreography needs to be based on the difficulty of the choreography actually performed during the competition.
Even with the elements, we (skater, tech panel, TV commentators, etc.) might know what the base value for the technical elements would be if the skater gets full credit for all of them. But in practice a skater might execute one of the features in a spin or step sequence not quite well enough to get credit and only earn level 3 instead of the planned level 4, or the skater might underrotate a jump, or double a planned triple, and thus earn a lower base value than when she rotates it as planned. That's only taking into account the base value assigned by the tech panel. GOE from the judges is a whole different issue. It's entirely possible that in any two performances the skater will get higher base value for the element on one day and higher GOE for the same element on the other day.
If it were up to me, I'd just let women's PCS have the same factors as men's, and let the PCS represent a larger percentage of the total score in the women's competition. So jump content would have less effect on the final results than with the 0.8 short/1.6 freeskate factors (sorry if I misstated the value of the factors earlier).
So best SS/PE/TR/CH/IN vs worst in the ladies short = 1x 3T only, but in Men's FS = 2 quads.!
The best vs. worst total PCS in the ladies' SP at Worlds was 33.53 (averages in the mid 8s) vs. 19.24 (averages in the high 4s) -- total difference more than 14 points, or approximately equivalent to the base value for three triples including at least one harder one.
The skater who earned 19.24 for PCS placed 29th in the short program and did not qualify for the free skate. The skater who was the last to qualify in 24th place earned 20.20 for PCS, still more than 13 points behind the winner; the last-place skater in the SP earned 20.60 for PCS, higher than either of the above, so it was the elements more than the PCS that relegated her to last place.
There are a couple of different things going on here.
Even if every judge made a conscious effort to use larger gaps between highest and lowest component score for each skater, unless they all agreed on which component was best and worst for each skater, the averages would still end up in a narrower range than any individual judge would give.
Because the history of the sport in all eras has included so much generic choreography, judges probably come to expect "above average by skating standards" to qualify as "good." It might take more training in aesthetic principles in general for judges to recognize greater differences in choreography, or music interpretation -- especially those who have not studied the arts outside of skating and consider themselves more experts on skating technique than on artistic qualities.
There are surely some Golden Skate posters who are more knowledgeable about performing arts than some judges. Is the average level of arts knowledge among skating fans higher than among skating judges? Possibly.
On the other hand, the rules and traditions of the sport have taught judges to value certain qualities highly that may be unimportant and hard to discern on video for fans following along at home, and that permeate the whole performance. A skater who commands the ice with strong skating skills is also likely to make a stronger impression on judges in the arena in terms of performance/execution and maybe some areas of choreography and interpretation, and therefore earn higher PCS all around from the judges. Meanwhile, a slower, more tentative skater might have prettier body line and more subtle movements expressing the music that come across better on video than live, so most fans might agree that skater deserves higher PE, CH, IN scores even if the SS are lower and expect a bigger difference than the judges see fit to give.
Fans often watch just the top 6 or 10 or 20 skaters in the field, whereas judges see the whole field at that competition and have spent a lot more time watching non-elite skating. So what fans see as "worst" might actually look pretty good to most judges.
Does that mean that the judges are right and the fans are wrong? Or the judges are wrong and the fans are right? Or is it just a matter of different priorities and different experiences of the skating itself?
Can we choose a few performances, preferably skaters who have not competed head to head so that we won't be influenced by how judges actually scored them against each other, and discuss what kinds of scores we think they deserve for each component and why? I think it would be interesting to see how much we agree or disagree with each other, and how much difference we see between different components.
