Z-Score Ranking
- LISEF normalizes judges’ scores to calculate a project’s position relative to other projects in the same category. As an individual judge’s scores are entered, a mean score and a standard deviation for all of that judge’s projects are calculated and these are used to determine a Z-score for each of the projects he/she judged as they deviate from the mean.
- An average Z-score is calculated for each project by averaging the Z-scores from all of the judges who scored that project.
- The projects are then ranked based upon the Z-score averages. The project with the highest Z-score average ranks the highest in the category.
Each judge uses a different range of scores. A sample scoring (pdf) of a category with 5 judges demonstrates how the range a judge uses to score their assigned projects impacts the outcomes.