ISU reformed the “corridor” system of PCS scoring because the former approach led to “groupthink” and not objective judging

Posted on 2022-06-09 • No comments yet

 

ISU reformed the “Corridor” system of scoring PCS in figure skating.

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source: matchtv.ru

The ISU Congress approved a proposal to reform the judging system regarding the “corridor” of marks for the program components. This became known during the fourth day of the congress, which takes place in Phuket.

Currently, a special commission, the Officials Assessment Commission (OAC), functioning within the ISU, is monitoring the quality of judging. According to the previous regulations of the international federation, the reason for checking the activities of the judge by the commission was a deviation in the the components marks (Each of the five component criteria is considered separately. Judges’ scores for technique are not considered) by more than 1.5 points from the “average value” (the judges call it the “corridor”). The average score derived from the scores of all judges for a specific criterion.

The Netherlands has submitted a proposal to abolish this “corridor”. The authors of the initiative argued that the former approach of judging quality control causes the phenomenon of “groupthink”, when judges try to meet average (not always objective) values in order to avoid punishments and do not try to assess the criteria in accordance with the skill level of the skater. According to the federation that put forward the proposal, this devalues the very essence of the division of the scores into technical and component and makes it impossible to judge objectively.

Instead, it was proposed that the corridor should not be calculated for each criterion separately, but in total, based on the overall score of the judges for all five components. This will give the judges more freedom in evaluating the criteria and will allow them not to “adjust” the scores to each other, since even in the case of a large difference in the scores between the criteria, the total average scores of the judges will still be either approximately the same or diverge within acceptable values.

The proposal was adopted by an overwhelming majority – 56 delegates voted in favor, six abstained and one voted against.


 

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