Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Update on speaker point scales

In response to a question from cross-x.com, I checked to see if the point distributions are any smoother for teams that might clear. It turns out that they aren't, except to the extent that the distributions have a narrower range:

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Changing the speaker point scale

The Georgia State tournament is moving to a 100-point speaker point scale next year. This will make them the third large [N.B.] tournament to use a non-standard scale. I have put up some charts of how changing the scale affected point distributions at Wake and USC.

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.