Inaccurate Contest Scoring

There is a logic behind devalued days - unappealing
as it seems on first inspection.

The intention is to keep the standard deviation in
scores (the 'spread' in points) relatively consistent
over the course of a contest. Devalued days essentially
reduce the landout penalty if lots of pilots land out.
Why? Because the belief is that if a few pilots do
really well and a lot do poorly, there was likely something
odd in the weather conditions for the day or the way
the task was called to increase the 'luck factor' for
that day. While this may not always be true, it tends
to correlate pretty well in my experience.

Without devalued days one pilot might end up with an
insurmoutable lead early in the contest - hundreds
of points, perhaps 1000 in the extreme scenarios mentioned
here. The all (s)he would have to do is leech on the
next best pilot(s) for the rest of the contest - not
much fun. And no way to pick a champion in my view.
At least with devalued days a less skilled pilot would
have to put together a string of exceptional performances,
rather than just one - lucky or not.

It's fine to argue about the merits of every day counting
the same - but in the real world there are enough unusual
circumstances that competition pilots on the whole
have elected to deal with it this way.

I know Bill has an alternative that has been used in
Canada, I think. It ensures that no two days count
the same, but deals with landouts in a different way
and has some other pluses and minuses, some of which
are safety related.

It was debated here several months ago.

9B

At 18:06 05 June 2004, Chris Ocallaghan wrote:
Bill,

the scoring system is goofy, and we keep trying to
rejigger it, with
greater or lesser success. But one thing is a constant...
the best
pilots keep winning. Why is that? When I figure it
out, I'll be sure
not to tell anyone else.