Thanks for posting the graph. It is clear that the only way you could raise par to 1000 on those courses that play far below 1000 is to designate a lot of par 2 holes. This thread has a lot of debate on the 2 contrasting views.
1) If par for a round should be 1000, then you will need par 2 holes on easier courses
2) Par 2 doesn't make sense because I can't get a birdie
I don't think the 2 views necessarily have to conflict with one another though. Just make a Gold level par 2 for A tiers or whatever level tournament has pros whose average rating merit a Gold level event. For example, my local course plays about 920 for par. Mostly par 3 holes. So it is basically Blue level tees. Should you play a Gold level event there? No. But if you did, you would certainly see a birdie fest. Or you drop three of the par 4 holes to par 3 and drop four or five of the par 3 holes to par 2. Now you have a 1000 rated par round. Doesn't change the way a <920 level player like myself sees the course. Got a 2 on that hole that averages <2.4 for the pros? Still a birdie for me.
Here's a pro tip for anyone wandering into this thread for the first time:
You only need to read the posts by DavidSauls. All of his make sense, and he has referenced every thought that makes sense.
Like David said, par does not need to be rated 1000. I used to think it should be rated around 1000. That was because when I started this, the only courses and events that had hole-by-hole scores were those that were held on courses designed for top players. On those, standardized par was generally rated from 990 to 1030. The range indicates the different levels of punishment the courses gave out for errors.
Now that everyone is using PDGA Live Scoring, I can look at a lot of events held on smaller courses. On those, par can be rated quite low. The reason is what David said, and it can be even more extreme than that. These courses might have one or two par 2 holes, but there generally aren't enough holes that should be called par 2 to raise the round rating of par up to 1000.
(Re-labeling the so-called par 4s and 5s on these short courses is usually needed to bring par down to standard.)
I've actually stopped looking at
just the round ratings to see if par looks OK. However, it is still true that the farther below 1000 the round rating for par is, the more likely it is that par is too high.
For the other point, the definition of par does not mandate that birdies be possible. Set par as the score that an expert disc golfer would be expected to make on a given hole with errorless play under ordinary weather conditions, and let the number of birdies, bogeys, eagles, etc. fall where they may. Otherwise, birdie, bogey and eagle won't really mean anything.