- Joined
- Jun 21, 2003
No definitly not. That would mean the judges know the exact difference between a 7.75 and a 7.50. But noone knows. ...
That means the system is too sensitive and judges mark skaters more accurately than a human is probable able to..
I think that the points made by gkelly in post #39 are quite vaild, however (9.75 ). Phycholgists tell us that the human brain is capable of distinguishing about 7 different comparative categories. The IJS asks judges to distinguish among 41, from 0.0 to 10.0. This is obviously impossible.
But if we begin with the observation that, based on a judge's experience with judging hundred of contests, this performance was somewhere around the 7s or 8s, well, now there are only eight gradations, from 7.0 to 8.75 to distinguish among. This is about the right number that a judge can handle.
Also, although we can consistently distinguish only about 7 or 8 pre-determined categories, when we directly compare one against another we can always determine that this one is better than that one, even if the difference is very small. (This is a virtue of ordinal judging.) If we give a 7 to all of the skaters, it is useful to be able to say that even though they are all 7s, this one is a little more more 7 than that one.
Remember that the 10.0 scale covers all of skating, where 0 represents not doing anything at all ...
I remember one time a dance couple had to withdraw before an event because of being injured in practice.. When it was their turn they skated onto the ice, bowed to the audience, and left. One judge gave them a positive score, 0.25, in presentation.