Re: Camporee scoring

I have read about this theme started by Ches Martin with
great interest and would like to give my 2 p. But since I don't
post often, I would like to tell about myself, that I have been
main-responsible for our national patrol-competition once,
responsible for scoring-keeping another year in the national
patrol-competition and the same jobs at our districts competition
some years back.

I agree with Ryan Keil who points out
> I am first and foremost concerned that the perspective be
> maintained. Scouting does not exist to foster competition.
> Competition is a tool of Scouting, only a tool, for advancing
> principles
This is essential, I quoted it here, so you could read it again :-)

Keeping this ind mind, I think you have to design your
scoring-system so *everyone* find it reasonable. One easy way to
do this, is to announce the scouring-system before the
arrangement, especially when the scoring is based on
1) Time used in solving the question.
2) Ranking of the patrols (as in Ches's case)
3) some kind of not-obvious formula

If you announce the scoring-system before each activity it might
get the competition to much in focus, so you have to
develop some kind of consensus about the generel principles.

I would like to present one way to do this:
First of all, choose your activities so they represent a wide
range of scouting activities. This would make the program
interesting also for the patrols which don't participate because of
the competition.

Then each activity are given ideal-scores proportional to the
time allocated. This could be identical with the number of
minutes, i.e. an half-our activity could at most give 30 points.
(Be careful if the patrols can choose among a lot of activities
and is'nt expected to solve all exercises. If a patrol can get 20
point of 30 in 10 minutes, its possible to socre more than
maximum!)

Continuing this top-down principle, you can divide each activity
in sub-activities summing to the right allocated max-score. And
you can divide each activity into different criteria again
keeping the total-sums right.

When determing scores, I find it a good approach to let the
patrols earn the first points easy and the last one hardly, an
example: In a 30 points activity only few patrols should score
less than 10 points so noone are considered extremely stupid. But
only a very well working patrol can get 25+ points. This is the
result if yoy brake your activities into relatively small
sub-activities/criteria.

This system we have used for years and my experiences are almost
possitive. I have noticed people shouting for justice in only a
few cases, all of them involving one of the above mentioned "take
care" situations. One example are when patrols return from
orienteering after
40, 41, 60, 66... minutes but get scores
64, 32, 16, 8
because a ranking system similar to Ches's was used. I personally
don't like this system because of experiences as this example.

Turning into Ches's real problem of calculating a troop-score we
run into trouble. I feel this is impossible to do fairly because
of
1) Patrols are not homogeneus in number of members
2) Troops are ...
3) Mathematically its nonsence to take this kind of averages:
The patrol getting 30 points of 30 are much better than two
patrols getting 15 of 30 - and when is a patrol dobble as
good as another?
So you have to choose your system and announce it. And when you
choose you should be aware that you are favouring someone: The
troop with many but small patrols for example.

All right I better stop know, but for you who still are with me,
I have an idea to think about: If you would like to find the best
*scout* among the competitors you are doing all activities in
mixed patrols - new patrols for each activity. For some
activities the patrols can be big, and for other activities they
might be small but keep them equally sized. The patrol-score are
added to each member of the patrols personal score and at last
each scout have some point from hes participation in one patrol,
some from another and the scout must with the highest score must
be the best. I realise this is a little complex, but since we in
Denmark are enfavouring co-operation higher than individual
skills, I guess this system will do the job.

Yours in scouting

Joern

...I used to be a Falcon...
-------------------- Phone: +45 89 42 34 95 --------------------
Joern Lodahl Institute of Mathematics
Graduate student Aarhus University
Regional Science Denmark
-------------------- E-mail: jqrn@mi.aau.dk --------------------

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