Rules for the intra-forum contest #3:

1. Everybody please rate as many songs as you can, but at least 6, or else your entry may be disqualified. Give marks out of 10. You may use 0.25 increments if you wish.

 

2. From past experience it appears that the marks themselves are rather meaningless, what stands out more is each judge's relative ranking of the other contestants. This is even more obvious in cases where two contestants are compared when they were judged on by a different set of judges. Therefore I will rank the scores that each judge gives to a set of contestants by sorting the marks in descending order and replacing them with rankings. For the marks given by a particular judge, the highest mark will translate into rank #1, the second highest is rank #2 and so on. This is where it will be really helpful to ensure that you, as a judge, don't give the exact same mark to more than one contestant, especially the highest mark of the lot.

 

3. For each contestant I will then use the 5 best marks (or rather rankings) from all the judges who judged that contestant and come up with an average ranking. I will then sort those average rankings in descending order and produce the final rankings.

 

4. If there is a tie for rank #1, I will then ask everybody to please vote on the contestants and see who of them wins. The vote will done by a vote caster from http://www.bravenet.com that I will set up if necessary, so it will be a blind vote and limited to one vote for each individual who chooses to vote. You get to see the vote stats only after you cast your vote :) The vote will be limited to a small time window, so as not to delay too much the final result.

Now, if everybody who submits a song judges everybody else's, and, conversely, everybody who judges also submits a song, I will use all the marks for computations, not just the 5 best marks.

In case anybody thinks this will be too much work, rest assured that that's why computers were invented!