With so many couples and scores bunched together wouldn't it be better to add .5 to the scoring arsenal. When I score them at home I often think a little better but not a whole mark. Using an extra .5 last night my personal preference dished out the scores like this.

Ali & Brian - 8.5
Chris & Ola - 8
Ricky G & Erin - 7.5
Jade & Ian 7
Ricky W. & Natalie 6.5
Natalie & Vincent 6
Zoe & James 5.5
Phil & Katya 5
Laila & Anton 4.5
Jo & Brendan 4
Craig & Flavia 3.5

I shake my head at the judges sometimes, I know they have their favourite couples bunched always at the top, but how can they possibly look at Laila & Anton and mark them the same as Chris & Ola.

There were 3 2-couple ties in the scores this week, which is worrying.

It also means that the change in the scoring system is having a larger effect than anyone may have expected. (When there's a 2-couple tie, for example, the next couple down gets the next lower number of points, where before there'd have been a gap, and the next couple down would have gotten 2 fewer points. So every tie gives an extra point to every couple lower on the leaderboard, compared to other years. That may be one reason we've seen Zoe and Jade in the dance-off.)

I agree with whoever mentioned that the judges should give 2 marks - one for technicality & one for artistic merit. That should then ensure that there are hardly any ties.

I think that if the voting system had to be changed, it should have been changed so that if 2 couples tied, then they should take the marks that they would have been awarded for the judges section (e.g. 6 & 7) and divide them between them - so that each have 6.5. The couple below them would have 5, so would have 1.5 marks to climb - which, for me, is preferrable to the 2 from the old system or the 1 from the new system.

However, OP, I do agree that too many couples are tying when, if you look back at the dance, one was clearly better than the other. Possibly, in the event of a tie, the judges should say which gets the higher mark & which the lower.

I think that there were better ways to address it than the current way - however it does make it more exciting, but also does highlght how often couples tie, when really there should have been a difference in marks.

I've always said I'd prefer marks out of 20 or even 25.

In an earlier thread on marks I mentioned it might be good to separate artistic merit from the technical side, but, on reflection, I wondered if that would just make things more complicated.

I think that having separate artistic and technical makes would create endless controversy, as it often did in figure skating.

Agreed. The two are taken into consideration anyhow in the marks which are given. A generous judge would not necessarily be less generous with two categories from which to score.

The .5 system might be an improvement at least as far as being able to give 9.5 not 10s, and to give the judges some flexibility if they score an early dance highly only to find a later one is better.

Of course the current scoring system could be improved. It's not an exercise in subtlety and there's an element of 'entertainment judging' about it.

My personal taste is for separate 'technique' and 'performance' marks but that's as much to do with giving the judges less leeway for BS as anything. On the down side, it would probably increase controversy which in turn may lead to more anti-judge voting...and I'm not convinced it would make enough difference to justify it.

Although it's easy to quibble with individual marks, ultimately the scoring system does tend to put the couples in a reasonably sensible order....which arguably is all it needs to do. That written, the new way of dealing with ties is patently absurd and if it's contributing to the likes of Zoe and Jade ending up in the dance-off, the method should be ditched.

I have been wondering about this; it seems as if it might favour couples at the bottom of the table of judges scores. I must try and find the thread which explains the system.

The judges should split any ties by deciding which couple ranks in what position like they do in the Eurovision Dance Contest

i completely agree. I was trying to start a thread about this last week, but couldn't explain it very well, but I think people getting ahigher number from the judges, ie no one gets 1 or 2, means that the public vote has a greater effect - so if people don't bother voting for the top half "because they are safe" - they aren't. Why else have we seen couples SO high up falling to the bottom?

I'd love to see the figures though!

The judges should use paddles 4-1 to spread out the scores.

Of course. It wouldn't take Einstein to come up with a system that made it impossible to have equal positions, either by having a tie-breaker or by half points. They were quick enough to bring in Lens votes as a tiebreaker for the Xmas special a week after the semi debacle last year, so why not this series?, makes no sense.

Although I am not 100% happy with it and think the judges should be able to award point five points to have less ties, I would like to point out that the rules have been changed to basically do what the 'public' wanted last year which is to have more power in the result. The BBC have done this so that we can literally turn the judges table upside down and not have people so far apart in points that they were literally 'safe' or literally 'unable to be saved'

And I think Len would mark even more narrowly then, he'd only use 15-20. But the others may mean that there's less of a draw.

I'd love to see Craig giving a 3 out of 20!

no i think that in the case of a tie in the score's like laila and chris they should choose which one was better and place them on top

I'm with you on this. For the last two weeks, a couple coming third on the leader board has been in the dance off. This has been a good thing because it has meant that the worst couple has gone but it's getting to the stage where one of the best couples could be out.

Chris should have scored much higher than Laila anyway.Considering that he has to lead and did a couple of lifts, I'd have placed him closer to Zoe than Laila.

I really don't see the point of giving them a 20 point scale when (apart from Craig) they rarely use more than 5 of their available scores. They could differentiate using their existing paddles if they chose to.

I agree with you in theory, but in practice they don't seem to do this, having .5 would, hopefully, stop them using 9 and 10 too soon and avoid the twos and threes that everyone seems to get so upset about. On the other hand knowing these judges it probably wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. Maybe we are just being too reasonable about the whole thing.

I don't think they need to introduce a different scoring system, they just need to make full use of all the paddles available. They started off this series with some pretty high scores which inevitably meant that, as couples improved, we were always going to end up with lot's of couples receiving 7s and 8s.

If they worked on the theory that average = 5 instead of the 7 points that they seem to award they would have more room to manouvre.

Two marks would mean people getting very low marks and very high votes for it - real technical difficulty is confined to 2 or 3 people and if you marked that relative to them others would start at half marks before getting anything wrong. It would also just raise the question how to mark something difficult that went wrong as a third issue. Gymnastics and diving gives a difficulty tariff but their scores are totally incomprehensible to most viewers. Some people would score almost nothing for performance either - and probably win on all the low marks. The current system at least allows you to give 5s and 6s for turning up wheras being more specific would probably end up in your marks looking indefensible or in pitiful but realistic marks .

I don't have any great problem with deciding that the celebs come in groups and parking several on one mark. I would have more problem with the OP arguing that Chris and Ola were in the same league as Ali or Ricky W or even Zoe. If Len didn't make things worse by chucking higher marks out to the undeserving there would be fewer ties anyway as Bruno and Craig do make distinctions that Len sometimes blurs. The main problem with the ties is that the new counting system makes the points difference between the good and the dire less - but they could easily fix that by only bringing in the system to stop a SF tie causing problems when it could pose a problem and thats probably not before the SF.

I almost didn't put that list up because I really didn't want to get into a discussion defending the scores, but I was worried I hadn't been clear in my explanation. This does highlight one problem that I have with the judges, they sometimes decide who they think are the best dancers and mark accordingly. I don't necessarily believe that Chris and Ola are in the same league as the others you mentioned but I do believe in marking each dance fairly and on Saturday Chris & Ola and Ricky G and Erin, in my opinion danced very entertaining, well choreographed routines that charmed and entertained, for me the whole package on this occassion was better than the others, other weeks they haven't been. My problem with the judges is that they tend to decide in the first week what each couple is worth and mark accordingly, bit like ice dancing back in the day. But it's all personal opinion and you are right it might have been better to keep the old system until the semi-final.

I like the way it is this year as the old nugget "no one is safe" has never been truer.

As long as I have read these boards, a large portion of the memberbase has suggested the judge's leaderboard should be done away with altogether and/or the dance off should be removed (lowest public vote goes).

The system this year is a nice compromise and compliments the fact that dancing technique alone is not a priority with the general audience.

Exactly!

Agree with this. In the early weeks of the programme we accepted that many of the celebs would only score 2-5 points and we were happy with that, now there is booing if someone is given a low score. As the OldLady says, no point in increasing the number of points.