Emma asks:
The skater who deserves a larger gap because her skills are unbalanced is the exception, not the rule.
Emma asks:
The skater who deserves a larger gap because her skills are unbalanced is the exception, not the rule.
I have always wondered if this was the rationale for marking skaters from 0 to 6.In general, people can only discern noticeable differences in a subjective skill at the 10-15% level.
I have always wondered if this was the rationale for marking skaters from 0 to 6.
Seven gradations = 14 per cent difference in skill level.
I went back and looked at the marks from several club competitions I have in my computer. For one in the Midwest the judges kept the spread in the PC marks at about 0.25 points. For a few competitions on the Pacific Coast a spread in the PC marks of 0.50 to 1.00 was not uncommon.
Does this refer to spreads within each skater's marks, or within a whole field?
Isn't that the same thing done in the five groups of 6 in Seniors? Regardless how one skates, whatever group the skater is in after the SP his marks in the FP will have a cap on them, and that skater will not move up. If it's a top skater who just happened to skate a poor SP, he will get the best score for the FP but not enough to move him to a higher level group. (Sarah Hughes at Worlds 03). How many skaters have you seen move up to the higher group after the SP? (Takahashi and Lambiel were in the last group to skate).That is the spread in the panel average for individual skaters. The spread for individual skaters for individual judges is a bit greater.
Within a whole field in Novice and below, the marks typically span a factor of 2-2.5, say in the 2's for the bottom skaters and 4s to 5s for the top skaters. TES also has a big spread in a whole filed. As low as in the low 10s up to high 20s (even for Novice).
OK, here is a little mini-case study.
Unfortunately, there is no Program Component titled “little black Audrey Hepburn dress” (10.0)..
I think they are OK in the sense that I understand why Alissa's marks in certain areas were higher than others. I am undecided about whether all five marks are too close together or not.Thanks for the analysis, MM. So, I understand that you see these PCS marks as differentiated among components and fairly accurate...
Actually, that's a pretty cool question.Ok so my question is: i don't quite follow the 10-15% thing and how that relates to the number 6
On the contrary, IMHO that is THE question. I don't know the answer. Statistical methods are not of much use, because they all depend on some sort of randomness in selection of the data. I have read a lot of discussion of this question from a mathematical point of view, but have come away unimpressed....but I think my question is does the range of variation seem to fit what you would expect (given what we have been discussing)....or is this a ridiculous question?
But for the PCSs the judges must decide whether a skater's performance deserves a 6.25 or a 6.50. This is dicing it too finely -- it is impossible for judges to tell the difference on a consistent basis. The PCSs go from 0 to 10, so there are 40 different gradations, 0 to 0.25, 0.26 to 0.50, etc. This is too many and makes the judges' burden impossible.
OT -- I went to a local charity show last month. During warm-ups, mixed in with the club skaters of all ages and skill levels was the headliner, Yuka Sato. A different world.If I'm on the ice and a teenage skater I don't know also gets on and starts stroking around to warm up, I can make a good guess even before she does any elements as to whether she would most likely compete as no-test or preliminary or open juvenile or novice or senior -- whether her scores would most likely be 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, or 5s.
I don't know how to research this, either. And my own personal opinion is that it doesn't make any difference.I don't know how to research whether it would be better to use a scale with the highest value set at 6.0 or 10.0 or some other number, or whether to allow judges to subdivide the marks by 0.5 or 0.25 or 0.1 or some other fraction.
Tell me which scale to use, and I'll adapt my thinking to fit it.
So for Open Juvenile maybe the IJS component scores would end up ranging from 1.75 to 3.25. That's your 7 gradations right there. That's the micro scale appropriate to this small competition of skaters at approximately the same level.
If I were asked to judge heights, and the heights were 5.01 feet to 5.07 feet and I have seven graduations of 0.01, I am screwed, because there is no way I can pick out a difference of 0.01 feet without a good ruler.
Also implicit in a lot of your discussion (the macro/micro thing) is you are thinking in terms of relative placements.
One more example of the difference between the absolute and relative judging, is Mathman's sticks example. If I give you 18 sticks, say between 3.5 and 5.0 inches long, and ask you to place them in order of increasing length, if you compare them one to another you will probably do a decent job, and without having to know how long any one of them is in an absolute sense. On the other hand, if I show them to you one at a time and ask you to tell me how long each one is in inches (without access to a ruler) and put them in the order of your length estimate you will not do nearly as well.
IJS relies on absolute judgements AND it does not provide the judges a decent ruler. (In fact for the PCs there are no rulers at all.)
This is one of the best threads ever IMO.For Interpreations it is not uncommon to have a program that follows the rules of design built into the CH mark and so deserve a decent score there, but the performacne has no heart, not soul, no sense of the timing or the character of the music, no nuances. So the IN mark goes down significantly compared to the CH and PE marks.
Perhaps in certain championship events, where all the skaters are decent all five PC marks should be similar most of the time, and unbalance is the exception, but in a typical competition, and even at a Regional CHampionships, the range of skill of the skaters is very large, and a significant fraction of the skaters have distinctly unequal skills.
:agree:100%Gkelly's post
:agree:100%, that is what really happens. Is that good? - is it meant as some way to make a career more important?However, the judges themselves don't need all these numbers to know their own minds. IMHO we see this over and over. The judges decide who they think deserves to win, then they make sure that the points come out that way, even if they have to give inflated PCSs. Like Plushenko at the Olympics, Slutskaya at 2005 Worlds, Meissner at 2006 Worlds. These skaters clearly outskated everyone else. The purpose of giving out marks at all is to make sure that the best performance carries home the top prize. (Really, the numerical scores have no other purpose than this.)
JMO.
Could it be the sport should put more emphasis on a "season" much like many sports do? ~ usually by "play-off" style. It would seem that having a "score earned in year" as a "benchmark" might work. ???I agree there is lots of room for improvement at defining the benchmarks.
A balance???IMHO, to expect the CoP or anything else to change figure skating from a judged sport to a measured one is unrealistic.
Inches are meaningful differences to the trained human eye; hundredths of feet are not.
But it has everything to do with the question of whether the Program Component Scores can really do what the ISU advertises.(But what this has to do with the meaning of Interpretation beats me. Seems we have gotten a bit off topic!)