Short answer: No, our auto-assignment feature does not include a cap on the number of times a Competitor is evaluated. You will need to do assignments manually to achieve this (or use our new auto-assign all feature, and then make manual edits). We don't recommend manual assignments.
Long answer:
For many of our customers, it's important for each Competitor to be evaluated a minimum number of times. For many of our customers, this is 3, to get a reasonable average score.
We support you, our customers, to achieve this minimum number of evaluations per competitor by adjusting the Competitors per Judge number on the Dashboard tab.
We do not have a setting to cap the number of evaluations per Competitor. There is no reason to worry about this, as the results control for this (a Competitor with 4 judges will not have a higher total score than a Competitor with 3 judges).
We have been running competitions for 10 years. We intentionally do not offer a cap because it doesn't allow events to be flexible.
Let's walk through the example below to understand why:
Let's use an example:
Say you have 100 competitors and 50 judges, with no matching restrictions and a goal for each competitor to be evaluated 3 times.
100 competitors x 3 evaluations per competitor = 300 evaluations total
These 300 evaluations need to be spread across the judges:
300 evaluations / 50 judges = 6 evaluations per judge
For this competition to meet the goal of each competitor being evaluated 3x:
Each judge needs to be assigned 6 Competitors
All judges must complete scoring for all 6 Competitors
All judges must show up (zero no show judges)
For in person events, we often see no-show rates of ~20%. At this rate, we would expect 40 of the 50 judges to show up in our example.
These 300 evaluations need to be spread across the judges who show up:
300 evaluations / 40 judges = 7.5 evaluations per judge
You can't have half of an evaluation, so we round this up to 8 evaluations per judge.
At this point, you have a few options:
You can set competitors per judge to 6 and pray that every single judge shows up and completes their ballots. Maybe everyone shows up and participates, and maybe not. You may or may not achieve your goal of 3 evaluations per competitor.
You can set competitors per judge to 8 (or higher). You have built in a cushion, so that if some judges are absent. You are more likely to get 3 evaluations per competitor, but you still might get less (if more than 20% of judges don't show up), or you might have more than 3 evaluations per competitor.
You can do manual assignments so each competitor has 3 judges assigned. We do not recommend this because if you have no show judges, you'll have to manually edit assignments, panicking, at the last minute during your live event.
We do not see the value in setting a maximum or cap on the number of judges that evaluate a competitor. There is no numerical advantage to a Competitor to having more judges, because the Results calculations account for that (math here).
Our priorities are flexibility (making sure no-show judges don't throw off your event) and fairness (spreading around judges to get even numbers of evaluations per competitor). Setting a cap on evaluations per competitor does not serve these goals.
If two evaluations per competitor is more important than these two things, that is fine! The in-person auto-assignment feature is not for you, and you should utilize our new auto-assign all feature and then review with manual assignments. Make sure to allot time at your event to adjust on the fly when you encounter no-show judges.
If you have questions, please reach out to your service rep or to inquiries@rocketjudge.com.