Objectivity and Effect of Order of Appearance in Judging of Synchronized Swimming Meets

Abstract

To determine the objectivity of judges and whether the scores of swimmers were affected by the order in which they competed data were analyzed for 87 AAU and 84 World meet swimmers who swam 6 and 5 figures for 8 and 12 different judges respectively. In both meets, the order of the swimmer's appearance was randomly drawn prior to each meet. The inter-correlations for the judges showed moderate objectivity, with 196 of 288 correlations above .80. The first group of 30 swimmers who performed in the World meet had significantly lower scores than swimmers in Groups 2 or 3 while no significant differences were found among groups for the AAU meet. When each group of 30 was subdivided into thirds no significant differences were found for any group in either meet. The direction of curves for the group mean scores for each meet was strikingly similar and suggests that continued investigation into “order effects” is warranted.

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