| Subject: Re: Thoughts on the new system |
Author:
Robin
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Date Posted: 19:21:52 05/22/03 Thu
In reply to:
Harriet
's message, "Re: Thoughts on the new system" on 15:42:16 05/22/03 Thu
>I agree...If you had a third heat against the other
>heat from your own university then the differences
>within your own team would be taken into
>consideration...but then the system would be a mixture
>of 'contribution to your team' and placings within
>your own team....are they compatible? and how much
>would they count? If they were to be to split up
>couples that had the same number of points (i.e. those
>who come 1st and 2nd in a discipline, both having
>beaten all couples from the opposite team) then I can
>understand it's use.
>
>But what happens here..(sorry another little example)
>
>There are two Oxford couples A and B
>
>In Ballroom, A comes 1st, a Cambridge couple comes
>second, B comes third (the order after that is
>irrelvant)
>
>In latin, B comes 1st, then all the other Oxford
>couples come 2 to 7 and A comes 8th (i.e. the last
>Oxford couple. The 8 Cambridge couples then follow.
>
>A has beaten one more Cambridge couple than B, and so
>would win 'Contribution to Oxford prize. However, A's
>placings were 1st and 8th, whilst B's were 1st and 3rd.
>
>Who's the better couple at dancing? I would
>definitely say couple B, 1st and 3rd indicates that
>they are more talented at dancing than couple A who
>came 1st and 8th, but under the new system, couple A
>would win the prize. Is that really fair? Seeing as
You can't say from this that couple B is better at dancing, merely that A is better at ballroom and B better at latin. The fact that there are 6 Oxford couples between them in latin but only one Cambridge couple in ballroom could be due to many different things.
It's very difficult to say from these results if someone is "more better" at one than the other couple is at the other discipline, especially if you base it on the performance of other people in between. In your example, couple A might be fantastic ballroom dancers, much better than couple B.
Or maybe couple A was in a heat with the 3 strongest Oxford latin dancers, who took lots of marks of him, whereas the ones in couple Bs heat were all a bit crap...
The one merit of the "new" system is that at least all couples in one team are compared to the same opponents. This is at the cost of discarding some information. In the end, none of them is suitable to see who is the better dancer overall, and as far as "blues" are concerned, it's only a minimum requirement, quite possibly the easiest one of the lot (compared to coming top 3 at IVDA and doing similarly well all year for example). I think either system has its merits, and is acceptable.
Robin
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