Competition Scoring Issues

Scoring Systems Issues and Problems

Most competitions use point-based scoring, but the way judges award points can create inconsistent results if judges don’t use the same scoring scale. For example:

• Some judges give scores very close together, while others spread their points wide.

• This “point spread bias” can let a judge with a wider scoring range have disproportionate influence on the outcome.

In extreme cases, a competitor that no judge placed first could still win a contest simply because of how the point totals added up.

Carnes Group designed the Normalized Scoring System (NSS) to fix this problem by converting each judge’s scores to a standard scale so that everyone has equal influence — no matter how they originally scored.

Example - The Normalized Scoring System Difference

Benny, Major, and Clark are judging a horse show. In the finals we have two horses, a brown horse, and a white horse. Each judge will score each horse up to 100 points based on how well they walk around the arena. The points will be added together for each horse to determine the winner.

The white horse walks around the arena. Benny really likes it and gives it a score of 95. Major likes the horse as well and gives it 93. Clark is not as impressed and gives the horse 80 points.

The brown horse now walks around the arena. Benny likes it OK and gives it a score of 93. Major likes it OK also and gives it 90. Clark was impressed and gave the horse 90 points.

The scores are added. The White horse has a total of 268 points. The Brown horse, however, has a total of 273 points! Even though two of the three judges agree that the white horse should win – the fact that they did not all use the same point spread, or scale, skewed the results. Most people would agree that since two of the three picked the white horse then it should win. But that is not how the points came out.

Using NSS, the white horse wins because the majority of judges felt it was the best that day.

The NSS gives far more accurate contest results and combines the best of both scoring systems using points and using rankings. 

Want the Full Explanation?

For a detailed description of scoring issues and how normalization works, you can download the full guide.

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Why the NSS was Created