Shirley Ballas’ Unusual Scoring
This year we said goodbye to the keystone of the judges’ table — Len Goodman hung up his Head Judge hat to spend more time with his pickled walnuts, and inheriting his paddles is Latin champion Shirley Ballas.
A friend made the point during S15E2 that Shirley’s scoring so far is “a bit rogue”.
Is this actually a thing, or are we over-analyzing her scores as a new judge?
The data seems to agree with the former (although the latter is also true!)
Methodology
We’ll be calculating standard deviation of the four judges’ dance scores as a measure of alignment for a single dance — a value of 0 indicates perfect agreement (that is, all judges scored the same) with larger values corresponding to more disagreement.
Using this, we’ll compare the distribution of alignment across episodes 1 and 2 in the last four series, and we’ll see that there is an unusual amount of disagreement across the first thirty dances so far this series.
Results
Conclusion
The data seems to indicate more disagreement in the first two weeks of this series than in the previous three series, and we could draw the conclusion that the addition of Shirley’s unexpected high-and-low scoring is reducing the overall alignment between the judges.
This is no bad thing! Dissent between the judges makes for interesting discussion and a compelling show, and Shirley thus far has delivered great technical comments to the dancers.
It’s worth noting that there is difficulty controlling for the quality of dances and celebrities across the field, and that individual judges have their own patterns of scoring high (Bruno) and low (Craig) this early in the series.
