Scoring Olympic Diving

I was watching the diving competitions on TV the other day, and I realized that the scoring is very weird. From what I can figure, this is how it works:

7 judges score the dive
they drop the lowest score and the highest score
they get the average of the remaining five scores
they multiply that average by the difficulty rating
they then multiply that number by 3

First off, is this correct? Secondly, why do they multiply the score by 3? The best guess I could come up with is because they are trying to come up with a scoring system where 100 is a really good score. Under this system, if the dive difficulty were 3.33 and the diver got all 10’s, their final score would come out at just about 100.

Anyone know the reasoning behind this?

PeeQueue

From the horse’s website:
(I have formatted some and underlined the section that answers your question specifically.)

Hope this helps!

Thanks sdimbert! It just so happened that with the number of judges my method will work out to the exact same score.

So the reason for the multiplier is that the number of judges is usually less.

PeeQueue

Nope; it’s just a different multiplier, as theirs factors in the average automatically. Instead of taking the average, they multiply by 0.6 = 3 / 5.

I think they pretty much always have seven judges, at least at this level.

LL

Then why would the nbcolympics page say that was the reason?

PeeQueue

2 possibilities:

  1. The folks at nbcolympics know more than LL42 (unthinkable!).
  2. The rules are written for all levels of competition, including those non-Olympic levels where fewer than 7 judges preside.

I think it’s pretty obvious which is the correct choice.

This is right up my alley…
The minimum number of judges for a competition is supposed to be 3, in which case all scores are kept. For many competions there are only 5 judges. The main reason for this is that at many meets there aren’t more than 5 coaches,(coaches always judge except at the olympics). In these meets, the highest and lowest score is dropped to accomodate the 3 judge convention. At larger more important meets, like US Nationals and Olympics, 7 judges are used. This was difficult a few years ago because meets were scored by hand and multiplying by 3/5 took too long. The typical solution was to drop the 2 highest and 2 lowest scores to get the requisite 3 scores. But now, with computers doing the work, multiplying by 3/5 helps eliminate any politiking going on between opposing judges. The standard 3 score total in all competitions is then multiplied by the DD to get the dive total. The main purpose for all this mess is so that scores are consistent from meet to meet.
In most college meets, there are only 2 teams competing against each other, so there are only 2 judges. This is overcome by multiplying the 2 score total by 3/2. As you can imagine, there is much cheating between coach/judges. As my college coach used to say, he’d decide the score he thought the dive was worth and then he’d decide what he thought the other judge would give, and he’d compensate to make the average appropriate.