The “Most Improved” award at the Nationals has recently been recalculated. The new calculation has moved away from a “raw” measure of places gained to one of “percentage” improvement. This utilises the proportion of progress towards the top of the board that one has made over the previous year. This change raises some interesting issues regarding what sort of improvement we are trying to measure.
In short, the “percentage” calculation allows more able sailors to show their improvement. E.g. someone who was second the previous year may gain 100% improvement by coming first in the following year and thereby be “best improved” by gaining just one place. Whilst it may be said that it is harder to gain year on year improvement if one is nearer to the top of the table, higher order competitors are closer to the prizes, anyway.
The “raw score” calculation gives those lower down the ratings a better chance of showing improvement. This is because the lower down the table you start, the more places are available to gain and the lower places are arguably easier to improve upon. Those near the top of the table in the previous year are generally excluded as they do not have as many places available to gain as those lower down. Those in lower ranks have the encouragement of an attainable prize for improvement.
Both of the measures are valid and perhaps there is a place for each of them. If, however, the objective is to encourage those in the lower orders to have on opportunity for a special prize then the raw score method is more appropriate than the percentage one.
There is a “half-way” position which could be applied to recent results to see if a more satisfactory measure can be achieved. Quite simply, the answer is to mix both methods as follows:
1. Discount from the previous year’s results anyone who did not start the requisite number of races (say five for a series of seven races).
2. Calculate, for these competitors only, a percentage ranking and also a raw score ranking.
3. You now have two sets of results which can be treated just like the results of two races, so add each competitor’s scores (rankings) together to create a new ranking based on this.
4. Voila!
This may have to be done manually unless someone is very talented at using Excel. The only alternative I can see would be to revert to “raw score” but include condition “1.” above. All depends on what sort of improvement we wish to emphasise; those in a specific band (raw score), or a wider group, including those in higher orders (percentage mixed with raw score).
I haven’t yet tested this development (raw + percentage) on actual figures but I would be interested to know what people think of the idea.
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Would it be useful to take improvement, year on year, to the percentage position in the fleet and combine it with a proportion (ie a reduced amount of) George Wood's ranking (somehow)?
