Getting There
To get to the library housing judged elements and evaluation criteria, open the COMPETITION LIBRARY and select Scoring Library.
Judged Elements Explained
Judged Elements are tricks, maneuvers or characteristics of the competitor or competitor's entry (like a car, a pet, business deck, etc.). A collection of elements are grouped together into each class and given relative weighting to reflect the comparative importance of the elements within that class. To modify any scoring library, just access the Scoring Library section under the COMPETITION LIBRARY menu. You can toggle among the libraries by using the controls in the upper right.
Sample Class
In the sample class below, you'll see we are using 7 judged elements for a business pitch contest. Each element has a weight (which you can change freely, provided the total of all elements sums to 100%). The elements used in this class can be reused in other classes. Notice that one element has multiple evaluation criteria. Each criteria can have its own judge guidelines to help each judge stay in sync with the others.
Mobile Judging Screen
If you want to manage your judged elements in bulk, use the Scoring Library. You can also create and add judged elements on the fly in the Class Studio. Clicking on any element will allow you to make changes and assign evaluation criteria to the element. Most elements simply need ONE criterion (e.g. SCORE or EXECUTION), but you are free to nuance a element by adding multiple criteria (e.g. precision, realism and scale speed) to that one element. Each criterion within a element will have its own judge slider so that judges can accurately assess the entry or contestant.
Notice also that every slider/criterion has a range of 0-10 or 1-10 (you choose). The system will enforce a single scoring range for EVERY criterion/element combination in a class in order for the normalization calculations to remain accurate. To vary the importance of one element to the next, use the weighting percentages, which you can assign within Class Studio.
To understand how the math works in this context, read this short article.
Modify or Create a Judged Element
From the Scoring Library, you can remove, modify or create a new element.
Example of an elective element for which you can create and assign pre-defined tricks/maneuvers for contestants to choose from when entering the classes which contain this element. In a business pitch competition or other non-sporting event, electives are rarely used but can be to award bonus points. In the example shown in the third screen above, the contestant would choose their revenue level from a menu during enrollment. Based on that, the system will award a multiplier times the score they award for the given element.
For additional guidance on judged elements and evaluation criteria, review these best practices.
Dynamic Judge Guidance
For each evaluation criterion, you have the option to include textual guidance as the judge's slider moves through the scoring range. Setting these gives judges more information on how accurately their numeric scores match with the performance they see.
Why Using The Same Point Scale for Different Elements Works Best
In many competitions, judges have a score sheet that instructs them to award, say, "up to 15 points" for one element and "up to 5 points" for another. This methodology evolved because when judging on paper, it's considerably more difficult to assign percent weighting to each element. The problem with this approach lies with the human mind. We intuitively understand a rating scale of 1-10. It's more difficult to conceptualize a 1-15 scale or a 1-5 scale, especially when those scales are interspersed among multiple judged elements. In the LiveJudge system, we allow you to assign a SINGLE scale (say, 1-100) that will apply to EVERY criterion slider in any judged element. This makes it far easier for a judge to assign scores. The software will apply your relative weighting percentages to account for the importance of each element relative to the others.
The Math Behind it All
Mathematically, here is what happens with a sample cooking event using 3 elements and different criteria within each element:
element 1: Appetizer - 25%
element 2: Entree - 50%
element 3: Dessert - 25%
Let's say you assign the following evaluation criteria:
Appetizer: Execution (1-10), Appearance (1-10) & Taste (1-10) [30pts possible]
Entree: Execution (1-10), Presentation (1-10), Texture (1-10) & Taste (1-10) [40pts possible]
Dessert: Execution (1-10), Appearance (1-10), Wow element (1-10), Originality (1-10) & Taste (1-10) [50pts possible]
At first glance, you might wonder how the system will maintain the proper weighting (relative importance) of the three elements given that dessert has a possible 50 points while it's equivalent element, Appetizer, has only 30 possible points.
Think of the point scales as ways to guide the judges through a precise analysis vs a way to accumulate competition points. Let's say a judge awards the following to a contestant:
Appetizer: 27 of 30 possible points
Entree: 32 of 40 possible points
Dessert: 25 of 50 possible points
We convert those awards to a ratio which reflects what percent of the possible points the contestant earned:
Appetizer: 27 of 30 possible points = 90%
Entree: 32 of 40 possible points = 80%
Dessert: 25 of 50 possible points = 50%
Next, we apply the ratio to the weighting:
Appetizer: 90% of 25 = 22.5pts
Entree: 80% of 50 = 45pts
Dessert: 50% of 25 = 12.5pts
Now, total those points:
22.5 + 45 + 12.5 = 80 points of the 100 possible (from your weighting distribution). Now, if you remove all but one criterion (keep Execution, for example), the results will be IDENTICAL.
Calculating raw scores using an achievement ratio allows your judging to be extremely precise while giving judges a live roadmap through each element. If the judge has to move 5 sliders for a single judged element, they will think about each criteria carefully. More importantly, your contestants will understand, at a granular level, why they received the total score they got.
From here, the software will allow you to scale the 80 to, say, a range using an absolute scale multiplier (like 10x) or a distribution type scale (like a curve on a test grade that goes from 1-1000, for example). If we scaled by 10, this contestant would have an 800 for their final score from this judge. This example does not account for penalties, bonuses or difficulty multipliers.