Battle Judging System...

[Vekked]

So I'm working on getting some battles together (traditional routine style stuff), and I've been putting some thought into a judging system that's somewhat standardized but simple enough to still be practical. This is loosely what I've come up with, just a ranking of 1-10:

 

Quality of routine:

 

(10) Classic

(9) World Champ

(8) World top 3

(7) National Champ

(6) National top 3

(5) Regional Champ

(4) Regional top 3

(3) Regional Average

(2) Regional Weak

(1) Beginner

 

It's not very scientific, but it's at least gives something to go by. I could maybe be more descriptive or provide some examples for some of the ranks.Thoughts?

[Guest loop skywalker]

sometimes in the uk regional weak can be regional champ...(im living proof of that ...twice)

[Vekked]

You're far from an example of what I would consider a weak regional champ loop. That is a good point but I guess the idea is that the system is somewhat relative so one persons idea of regional champ material might not be the same as someone elses, but they can still have people ranked in the same order. It just gives you a standard to go by in your head rather than each person making up their own system arbitrarily. I've tossed around the idea of using actual routines as examples instead but that might be a bit too subjective.

[Chris]

Some kind of weighted scoring model is important for judging I think. Rather than just one score, score on flow, record selection, difficulty, cleanness, style, showmanship, and apply different weights to each criterion to make sure that, for instance, just because something's difficult to do but doesn't have much else going for it it doesn't beat out someone else who was just plain funky and dope even though it was slightly simpler.

 

If those benchmarks are your criteria for scoring what I think you should do is find actual examples of routines you'd put in each category and then score them based on a bunch of criteria and play around with the weighting until you have something that works... then I think you'd have a really rock solid scoring system.

 

You don't have to bother judges with any of the maths, just ask them to rate out of a certain number for each criteria. Perhaps they could all be out of 6 to prevent ambiguous scoring:

 

1: no skills

2: some indication of skill

3: fairly competent

4: slicker than average

5: champ level

6: mind=blown

[Vekked]

Nice reply Chris. That got me thinking about the differences between Showcase vs. Head to Head style battling a bit. The judging system I had in the OP had supremacy style battles in mind, I was trying to keep it simple-ish and account for the times that you have to compare a guy who mostly scratches to a guy that mostly beat juggles... instead of trying to compare them directly (which is nearly impossible/doesn't make much sense to compare a scratch routine to a beat juggle), I thought it made more sense to compare them relative to other routines using that 1-10 scale.

 

But I can kinda see how that's overly simplistic for a showcase style battle where you can't just be like "his scratching is 8/10 and his beat juggling is 8/10, therefore he beats a guy who's 7/10 and 8/10". If one guy does 2 technical juggles and 2 technical scratch routines, and one guy does a technical scratch routine, musical scratch routine, technical juggle, and funky juggle, the 2nd guy is showing a lot more variation and diversity.

 

On the other hand it might be a bit much to expect someone to cover all the same elements in 2x 90 second routines, so probably a simpler model might be good, but maybe still have certain criteria like:

 

Scratching: 1-10

Juggling: 1-10

Performance (style, showmanship, dissing, etc): 1-5

 

Thoughts on different judging systems for the 2 different formats?

 

It's super annoying in some battles when there's no criteria and people just kind of make up stuff like "oh I was judging it on whether it sounded like a song" or "I was judging it on technique", or whatever. You can have 3 sets of judges come to completely different decisions. I also can't stand when the judgement is made by all the judges huddling together and discussing who's best... I mean in a perfect world everyone would be honest and objective but in reality it leads to political b.s. and favoritism, as well as having the same problems with people just making up what they're looking for as they go.