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Seeking Your Opinion of New Scoring System for Experimenting Design Challenges #2

rscasny

This is a follow up to my original discussion that you can read here. I think it was a valuable discussion and provided me with a lot of good ideas. I appreciate everyone who participated in it.

My takeaways from the original discussion were:
1. Requiring a weekly time limit for support blog submissions was not desirable.
2. All supporting blogs should be individually scored, not an all-or-nothing scoring.
3. Forum participation should be included in the final scoring.

All these are good points.

My top two goals are:
1. Participants are doing a lot of work in these challenges. I want to make sure that everyone gets credit for all the work they have done. This is why I want to go to a point scoring system.
2. I want to streamline the judging process. It can be cumbersome for the judges when they are given 20, 30, or more blogs in one shot and then they have to sort it out and rank the participants.

I looked at all previous experimenting challenges, I found the following:

table of results for lifetime experimenting challenges

This is my proposal for a point scoring system for experimenting challenges only:

  • The introductory blog must be submitted in the first two weeks of the challenge.
  • The final summary blogs and the extra credit blogs must be submitted by the end of the challenge period (10th week) to obtain credit. There is no weekly submission requirement.
  • The introductory blog is mandatory. Worth up to 100 points.
  • The final summary blog is mandatory. Worth up to 300 points.
  • Extra credit blogs are optional. Each participant can submit up to 5 extra credit blogs (in addition to the 2 mandatory blogs) for scoring by the judges. Each is worth up to 20 points.
  • Forum participation is optional. But those who contribute to the forum can receive up to 25 points.

If you have the time, please provide feedback below. Thanks.

  • I think it is a change that will benefit everyone.

    I have participated and been awarded in two of those challenges shown in the table.

    Reviewing now my participations I see that they suffered from the lack of a clear final summary. I understand that this makes the work of the judges very difficult. Lesson learned.

    I share the value that is given to the introductory blog. This blog is very important for the participant to set some commitments and a feasible work schedule.

    I also understand the limitation of optional additional blogs, a follow-up blog every two weeks seems reasonable.

    Thank you for being transparent when drawing up these new rules.

  • This scheme looks okay to me. I'm sure it will work when it becomes part of the rules. I expect everyone would simply organize their projects to have exactly 7 blogs. Creating more blogs would be counterproductive since it would reduce the content (and thus scoring opportunity) in the 5 supporting blogs.

  • This sounds good. It will require change strategy a little in comparison with current system but generaly it has several benefits like highlighting final project quality and introducing more deterministic system to the judging. In my case I will resolve the changes mostly by merging blogs. For example blogs describing my final project implementation likeBlog #9: Gesture Controlled Tetris and Blog #14: Gesture Controlled Pacman I will next time merge to one bigger final blog.

    I recommend selecting judges as soon as you selected contestants and assure that introductory and extra blogs will be graded continously, for example once every two weeks.

    Maybe consider changing maximum points for introductory and final blogs. I think previously announced limits 75 / 250 were better than 100 / 300. Currently writing 5 good extra blogs have the exactly same weight as writing 1 good introductory blog but writing 5 (good) blogs takes much more time and effort. My idea is to set limits 75/250 or 75/300 or use 100/300 and increase max points for extra blog from 20 to 25 or 30 (maximum from 5 extra blogs is 125 or 150 instead of 100).

  • in reply to misaz

    You don't have to write any extra blogs at all. It's optional. One should be able to win a prize if he/she does a fantastic job just on the introductory and the final summary blog.