[eDebate] 87 Average?

[Brian DeLong]

Clearly the results from Kentucky show a large discrepancy between  
pockets of judges in how they are interpreting the 100 point scale.   
Some people are on this 87=average boat, while others place average at  
around 78-80ish.  I'm no numbers game, nor an expert on the history of  
point distribution etc. but I do think more discussion on this scale  
should occur.

Reaching consensus is clearly impossible.  People are still going to  
fight the good fight against point inflation.

I would suggest that  tournament providers include in their invites an  
interpretation of the scale to help bridge this present gap.  You will  
have judges that fight this interpretation and that's fine, but for  
the rest of us who just want to make sure points are allocated fairly  
to the debaters it would be a great help to at least find a point of  
unity somewhere.  Without some point of consistent measurement to work  
off of we're going to continue to see some fairly decent judges being  
reduced on the pref sheets.  A counterargument to this is that maybe  
these anti-point inflation crusaders  aren't that great of judges to  
begin with in the first place.  Fair enough.  But for those of us who  
wish to stay in the realm of preferable judge, whether we are good or  
not, some baseline is needed.

Maybe it would be wise for us to vote on scales of measurement to set  
a norm for this community.  We have the ability to set up an informal  
or formal voting system.  This method would at least take the  
responsibility off a tournament host from arbitrarily choosing a  
baseline scale.

With that said, I am on board with voting for a point system that  
looks like this:

30-29.6 = 100-96
29.5-29.0=95-90
28.9-28.5=85-89
28.4-28=79-84
27.9-27=78-72
26.9-26.0=71-60

Thoughts?

To respond to number's games observations, As Ross Smith once claimed,  
the most recent scientific data indicates that we naturally cluster  
numbers to help us simplify complex information.  5 and 10 clustering  
is only inevitable.