Starting with Eventex Awards 2023, your entries will benefit from score normalization

When it comes to awards, nothing’s more important than providing a level playing field for all entries in participation. It’s an admittedly difficult thing to achieve, that’s why we keep perfecting the entry evaluation method to this day. Starting with Eventex Awards 2023 we’re getting ever so close to perfection with score normalization.

What’s score normalization

The short answer - we employ a mathematical formula to ensure that every entry is scored based on the same set of standards, regardless of how many judges are evaluating the program submissions. Essentially, it helps reduce variation in judging by standardizing each judge's scores. A simple example of why this is a much needed feature is when one judge has a more critical view, while another is more generous and wishes to give generally higher scores. This is less of an issue if all judges score all submissions, as such discrepancies do not bias the average score. At Eventex Awards however, judges score only subsets of applications and in order to account for the differences, we’re making the results more fair by standardizing the scores across judges.

How it works - the long answer

Score normalization uses two measures of distribution - a “mean” and a “standard” deviation. A judge’s scores are first scaled to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.Let’s assume a judge has given scores with values x1, x2, x3 … xn. The system starts the score normalization by calculating the mean deviation of a judge’s votes:

And the standard deviation like this:

Then it rescales each vote via the formula below:

Once the scores are normalized, the system can calculate the mean score for each application. But this presents scores that are out of the supposed range (for example 0 to 100). To solve this, we take the minimum and maximum mean score of all applications before the normalization, and shift and scale the normalized mean scores so we retain the same minimum and maximum mean score.If S is the set of original mean scores and N is the set of the normalized mean scores. We can denote these values:

Finally, We apply the following fit function to the normalized mean scores:

Basically, what the system does is it adjusts each score by finding the difference between both distributions for a single judge and again for all judges combined. The scores are more similar, because they are now aligned with typical distributions across the total judging population.

Fair judging, unrivalled transparency

Since the beginning of Eventex Awards, we’ve always strived to make the competition fair and keep it completely transparent, every step of the way. It’s what made it the #1 global competition in the world for events and experience marketing today. On that note, registration for Eventex Awards 2023 is underway. Register now to benefit from the exclusive early registration discount - there’ll be plenty of time to work on your submissions later!