Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Update on speaker point scales
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Changing the speaker point scale
As you might expect, the number of distinct speaker points per round and per speaker both increased. On the other hand, judges didn't use the whole range of points. At Wake (100-point scale), points clustered around multiples of 5. At USC (30-point scale, finer granularity), points clustered around the old half-point scale.
Are any other tournament directors planning on switching point scales? If you considered doing so, but decided not to, what stopped you? If you are switching, why did you choose the scale you chose?
N.B. Two other (smaller) tournaments changed speaker point granularity since '03-'04: the Weber State round robin used a granularity of 0.1 at their '08-'09 tournament, and the Northern Illinois tournament seems to have changed from the usual half-point granularity to a full-point granularity for their '05-'06 tournament.