Championship Scoring

One thing that separates Irish Dancing to other forms of competition is its unique scoring system.

In Beginner competitions without Premierships, there is normally only one adjudicator (ADCRG). So scoring is straight forward, the dancer with the highest marks wins.

In Premierships there are normally two ADCRG and so this is when the marking system differs.

I am going to try to explain it. … Boy this is scary.

The dancer does her hard shoe dance and receives a mark out of 100 from each judge. Then the next and the next etc. These marks are sent to the scrutineer to enter into the computer (try not using one)
Each dancer returns to do her softshoe and again each of the two judges marks her out of 100. The marks are then sent to the scrutineer.
The scrutineer then starts the process of turning raw marks out of 200 (or 300 for three dances) into place points.
Each judge's marks for each dancer are added together to give the mark out of 200.

Dancer	Judge 1 for both dances	Judge 2 for both dances
1	164	180
2	168	172
3	166	184
4	158	168
5	156	174
6	162	176

You can see that the judges mark very differently. Judge 1's highest mark is 168 and Judge 2's lowest mark is 168. It doesn't matter as the marks are now rated using the following scale.

Place	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	6th	7th	8th	9th	10th	11th	12th	13th	14th
Place Points Awarded	100	75	65	60	56	53	50	47	45	43	41	39	38	37

From 13th place down each place gets one less point. 50th place gets 1 point and from 50th down are unmarked. (If you watched the Subminor sections in Wollongong, that is what happened. Only in very large sections do you run out of place points)
So, back to our example. The dancers are ranked and allocated place points.

Dancer	Judge 1	Judge 2
1	164 - 3rd	180 - 2nd
2	168 - 1st	172 - 5th
3	166 - 2nd	184 - 1st
4	158 - 5th	168 - 6th
5	156 - 6th	174 - 4th
6	162 - 4th	176 - 3rd

Place points

Dancer	Judge 1	Judge 2
1	65	75
2	100	56
3	75	100
4	56	53
5	53	60
6	60	65

These are added and the places allocated from here

Dancer	Judge 1	Judge 2	Total	Place
1	65	75	140	Third
2	100	56	156	Second
3	75	100	175	First
4	56	53	109	Sixth
5	53	60	113	Fifth
6	60	65	125	Fourth

The presentations are now made.

You can observe a few things from this. A First and a second beats getting a first and a third, that's obvious, But when you have three judges funny things happen, like a dancer given one first place and two eleventh places, will beat a dancer that gets three fourth places. The system is designed to separate the field so no-one wins by just a mark or two.
Other odd things are ties. If a judge gives a tie for first place they don't both get 100, they share the points available for first and second (100+75 divided by 2) and get 87.5 points each. Therefore when a judge gives the same mark for two or three dancers further down the placings the same thing happens. A tie for fifteenth place, they share 36 and 35 points, so they get 35.5 points.

If there is a tie for a place the next place is not awarded.
Note: This doesn't apply to North America where theoretically you can have fifteen people in the National Top Ten.

If you would like a print out of the place points awarded to each place a copy is available here.

Championship Scoring

Back to Irish Dancing in Sydney © 2000 Amanda Finneran. Reproductions possible on request.

Back to Irish Dancing in Sydney
© 2000 Amanda Finneran. Reproductions possible on request.