Borda Count and the Ranking of Science Olympiad Teams
In the Borda count, a set of k alternatives are ranked based on the rankings of individual voters. The alternatives receive points based on each voter’s rankings. For each voter, the first ranked alternative receives k – 1 points, the second ranked alternative receives k – 2 points; more generally, the nth ranked alternative receives k – n points. The alternatives are then ranked by the total number of points they receive.
The Borda count is an example of a positional voting system, in which the alternatives receive points based on their position in the rankings of each voter. Positional voting systems have been used to rank sports teams – for example, this ranking of college football teams is produced by a poll of college football couches.
In Science Olympiad, a high school team science competition, a similar position-based system is used to determine the outcome of tournaments. At a Science Olympiad competition, N teams participate in 23 events. For each event, the teams are given points equal to their rankings in that event (1st place gets 1 point, 2nd place gets 2 points, and so on, until the Nth place team gets N points). Teams are ranked by their total number of points – the team with the smallest point total wins, and the team with the next smallest gets second place, and so on.
While this scoring system is not an election, each event does, in a way, act like a vote in a Borda count. If high schools A, B, and C receive 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in an event, they get 1, 2, and 3 points, respectively, added to their point total. Those points act like a vote saying that high schools A, B, and C ought to obtain 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in the overall competition.
Just as the Borda count is susceptible to strategic voting, the scoring system for a Science Olympiad can be greatly influenced by individual “votes.” In other words, the ranking of a single event can affect the final ranking of the teams. This often happens for the top ten teams of a Science Olympiad tournament. A team in the top ten generally does well in most of the events (often ranking better than 4th place, almost always ranking above 10th place), but the few events that the team does not do well in can add many points to the team’s point total. Usually, a tournament has 30 to 50 teams, so a team could get 30 points from doing badly in a single event. This can be enough to move the team down by a few ranks in the overall competition.
The analogous situation in the Borda count would be a voter ranking a popular alternative after many irrelevant alternatives, so that the popular alternative would lose many points and have a lower overall rank. Of course, in Science Olympiad, doing well or poorly in an event can be due to many factors, such as how much the competitors prepared beforehand and whether they make mistakes. The ranking of an event, then, is most likely not due to intentional manipulation.
Science Olympiad Scoring Guidelines. https://www.soinc.org/scoring_guidelines, https://www.soinc.org/divisions_abc