Quote by GrushaVashnadze
Even without your kind intervention, Nicola, would such subterfuge by contestants actually be worth the trouble? Both of the following comp entries of mine received straight "5" scores (c. 30 or 40 of them each) - and neither made it into the top ten. Apparently, therefore, public scores are of limited relevance, and the judges have other more important criteria. Am I right?
Metamorphoses
And There Came Two Angels to Sodom
Partly right.
I can never easily find the thread where I explain the process in detail (on my iPad so will check later as I’m sure it must be stickied or should have been!).
There are so many 5’s handed out, that when I pull up the competition data, sometimes a couple of 2, 3 or 4 votes knock down someone’s average to 4.85 for example.
When either myself or a Senior Moderator does the shortlisting, we read the lot if we have the time, or more often in my case, I’ll use the Top 20-30 from the raw output.
One story which is a certain Top 10 (I’m still going through them), was voted down by 3 other competition writers, and it was enough to knock the story out of the Top 30.
If I’d taken the approach that our only real competitor takes, that story would have been placed nowhere.
Due to these kind of underhanded tactics, and the effect of friend spamming, I go through all the votes first, pull those from other entrants, and run the query again. Then I read as many as possible to combat the effect friend voting has.
Ultimately we want the best stories to win / rank. Yes, any shortlister’s opinion will be subjective, but we have so much experience, the best stories usually (not always!) rise to the top.
In a competition run last year, a lovely diligent helper read all the competition stories and shortlisted them for me. The eventual winner was outside the Top 25 based on average score alone. That’s why human intervention is so important.
So getting a perfect score of 5 doesn’t mean you’ll be in the Top 10 even. There are close to double that number with an average score of 5 for this competition.
I hope that clears things up!
EDIT: I knew I'd stickied this somewhere!
Updated: https://forum.lushstories.com/yaf_postst67174_The-Competition-Judging-Process.aspx