[noob question] Are ratings rated equally?

[JC17393]

I dunno. The ratings give a pretty good assessment of the course for that round. And on the courses I'm most familiar with, when the layouts don't change much and the weather isn't extreme, the ratings have been pretty consistent from year-to-year, within about a 1-throw range. They give a pretty good measure of the difficulty of the courses.

I think the biggest misconceptions are that individual round ratings are precise, such as seeing a big difference between 992 and 1005, and particularly that small samples, like a single round, are expected to be precise.

Which brings me to agreeing that "....particularly only a single round's worth of ratings, is flawed from the jump."

I guess my point is more that while ratings can give you a decent estimation of course difficulty or an expected range of scores, to expect that the numbers will be dead on consistent on the same course every time it is played is flawed.

Ratings measure the players against the field, not against the course. For the sake of the math, the course itself is entirely irrelevant.

 

[urwatuh8]

Oh good. Another thread where people complain that ratings are not perfectly, 100% accurate.

Like any statistical measure, there is noise in the data; sometimes numbers are a little off. When you're trying to come up with a fine tuned measure of difficulty/skill from a small number of data points, it's never going to be perfect. They're still pretty accurate most of the time. And a lot better than nothing.

 

[Cgkdisc]

Most data points in a bell shaped distribution are "wrong". Their probable "wrongness" is reduced the more propagators in the field.

 

[Jouni]

Are all propagators treated equal? I mean does it matter how many rounds propagator has played, or how much variation the propagator's round ratings have?

 

[Cgkdisc]

Propagators all handled equally. If a player's rating is based on at least 8 rounds and above 799, they are a propagator. However, if a propagator shoots more than 60 points below their rating in a round, we exclude them from the official ratings calculations for that round. We did a test one time to see if using "better" propagators, i.e. those who were more consistent, would do a better job. Turns out, using all propagators is still better than using fewer super propagators. More numbers = tighter statistics

 

[Cgkdisc]

Here's a ball golf study that shows how tournament pressure makes playing more difficult. Some PDGA members wonder why ratings on the same course layout are higher for the same score at a tournament versus league play. That 3-5% difference in ratings seems to be attributable to tournament pressure.

 

[AlexJensen86]

So what you are saying is that if you shoot 5 down in one round in a tourney, you would get the same rating wether you played in open or rec?

Second question- in a two round tourney, why is it that of you score the same for round 1 and round 2, why are the round ratings usually different? Is it because round ratings are based on how your competitors do, which changes from round to round?

 

[grodney]

Are PDGA ratings rated equally all around? For instance..If an open player and a rec player both shoot the same score, will they both have the same rating for that round? If the answer is yes, then it's logical to think regardless what division they play in, if there rating is similar to yours you should be competitive with them.

Yes.

 

[Cgkdisc]

Q1 - Yes, assuming you played the same tees.
Q2 - Round Ratings are somewhat different when posted unofficially because only the scores for that round are used in the calculations. However, when we do the official ratings, the scores from both rounds are usually combined in the calculations so the same score will have the same rating in both rounds.

 

[DavidSauls]

EDIT: Nevermind, Chuck had the answer.