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13 January 2007

IONA rankings

For the past couple of years a ranking of teams on the UK & Irish circuit has been in development on the Britishdebate list. This now seems to have received formal acceptance and has moved onto the britishdebate website.

http://www.britishdebate.com/universities/results/rankings/index2.asp

It's not really a ranking of the UK & Irish circuit as the results from Worlds are included so several teams are in the list even though they never took part on the circuit. In addition many of the colleges who take part in weekly IVs aren't acknowledged in the rankings as they haven't performed well enough to be considered important enough to be ranked. Also the organisers of the list often have difficulty getting all the IV tabs. This is currently being discussed on the mailing list so I'm sure some agreement will be reached.

However it's an interesting view of which teams are doing well in UK & Ireland and hopefully it will evolve over time to give fair credit to the smaller teams. I know when I first put a Worlds Ranking on my site it went through 5 or 6 versions as I had considerable feedback from the smaller teams that the only fair way to acknowledge teams was on the points they earn before the break. In this way the more successful teams still move to the top and don't get an unfair boost from rounds that the smaller teams can't take part in
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:50 pm

    Colm,

    Fair comments - but just for the record there aren't any problems with Tabs this year - I've got every tab for every tournament so far this season, and some form of contact with all the remaining competitions, so that's no longer an issue.

    Also, few colleges who regularly take part in the IVs are not registered at all in the rankings any more - to avoid teams who do well being given huge points or the difference between different performances being minute I need to have a cut off point somewhere, which varies between the top half and the top quarter. This still means that by far enough of the tab is counted to ensure that almost every institution will have some team that earns them points after a few IVs have passed.

    Many thanks for the publicity!

    Jonathan LM

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