Explanation of the Changes to the Ballot
Some of you who were involved last year or who reviewed the ballot from last year may notice that that the
“Structure & Organization” and “Handling Judges’ Questions” categories are now scored out of 9 rather than
5. This is not a substantive change. Our tabulation process now includes a weighting step, where we weight the
scores in the different scoring categories. The results will be the same as if the judges had scored the last two
categories out of 5 as they were doing last year.
This change is a result of some difficulties last year; some judges evidently misunderstood the scoring system
and were rating students out of 9 for every category. We hope the change will make the scoring process less
prone to such errors.