You Can Do Better At Assessing Your Athletes

“We want to reduce bias,” “We want to capture better data.”

Those are common statements we hear from our clients. You may think that completing an assessment is simple, and it should be, but there are actually factors you may be unaware of that could be affecting your ratings. An important one is rater bias. Rater bias is an inaccurate distortion of measurement stemming from the individual who is filling out a survey. Rater biases and patterns can occur in even the most robust assessments because the truth is that everyone has biases.

In actuality, there is something very simple you can do to take a step towards “getting better data.” What mitigates the bias is making the rater aware of common types of patterns that can occur. This is not to say that is the only way to mitigate rater bias, but it’s one the rater has control over. Basic training will enable the rater to provide more accurate assessments and get closer to capturing the athlete’s true performance. This type of training can be more general, making it relevant to any type of survey the rater comes across. Here are some types of biases that should be discussed:

Types of Biases:

1. Halo: The tendency to let one’s overall impression of performance affect ratings of specific areas of performance.
2. Leniency and Severity: The tendency to be consistency less critical and more critical than appropriate.
3. Central Tendency: The tendency to provide ratings that are in the middle of the scale. Raters are reluctant to give either very high or low ratings.
4. Order (Primacy and Recency): The tendency to allow initial information or the most recent information to influence ratings.
5. Similar-To-Me: The tendency for people to be judged more favorably who are similar, rather than dissimilar to the rater in terms of attitudes and background.
6. Extraneous Information: The tendency to allow irrelevant information to affect what you are rating.

The next time you complete a performance assessment on your athletes, pay close attention to each question and ask yourself, “Am I letting any of these biases affect me, or am I really focusing on their true performance?”