Figure Skating Judging

[silverscreenselect]

... has sure gotten a lot more complicated from what I remember.

When I was younger, the judges scored the skaters on a 0 to 6 scale with two figures, one for technical merit and one for artistic. They added the two scores together to determine the winner.

Now, it resembles the calculations for a NASA moon flight. They keep a running score for each skater throughout the program and assign each jump a degree of difficulty and they actually have video review to determine if the skater actually completed the jump. Plus skaters can sometimes get a 10% bonus for something, perhaps it's understanding how all the scoring works. There's still an artistic score, but I'm not sure how that works either. For most of the skaters tonight, their artistic score was fairly close to their technical score. And they also have deductions which I guess happens if you fall down.

This allows the TV broadcasters to put up a running graphic to show how well or poorly the current skater is doing in comparison to the leader in terms of technical scores but it managed to confuse me more than it helped.

[a1mamacat]

... has sure gotten a lot more complicated from what I remember.

When I was younger, the judges scored the skaters on a 0 to 6 scale with two figures, one for technical merit and one for artistic. They added the two scores together to determine the winner.

Now, it resembles the calculations for a NASA moon flight. They keep a running score for each skater throughout the program and assign each jump a degree of difficulty and they actually have video review to determine if the skater actually completed the jump. Plus skaters can sometimes get a 10% bonus for something, perhaps it's understanding how all the scoring works. There's still an artistic score, but I'm not sure how that works either. For most of the skaters tonight, their artistic score was fairly close to their technical score. And they also have deductions which I guess happens if you fall down.

This allows the TV broadcasters to put up a running graphic to show how well or poorly the current skater is doing in comparison to the leader in terms of technical scores but it managed to confuse me more than it helped.

The 10% bonus is for doing big jumps at the end of the program, when they are getting exhausted.

Some incredible skates tonight

[bazodee]

The 10% scoring bonus is for jumps completed in the second half of the program.

Each element in the program has a base value. The harder to execute, the higher the base value. Once the element is completed, a Grade of Execution score is given, which can augment or diminish from the base value.

The transition from the 6.0 scoring system occurred immediately after the 2002 Salt Lake games where there was clear bias on the part of a French official in judging the Canadian versus the Russian pairs skating. The made the scoring system more objective; at least the technical component of the score.