Scoring Outliers' Effect on Race to Top
Louisiana officials are complaining that one Race to the Top judge sank their entire application.
Well, you can judge for yourself, but our own quick analysis shows Louisiana was affected more than any other finalist state by scoring outliers.
With the help of Stephen Sawchuk of Teacher Beat fame, we cobbled together our own scoring spreadsheet, throwing out the lowest and the highest score for each state, and averaging the remaining three scores. This means that a really hard grader, or a really easy grader, can't unduly influence the scores. We'll call this the McNeil-Sawchuk scoring system, inspired by the various scoring system changes in international figure skating.
The new scoring system would not have changed the outcomes for Delaware and Tennessee, which would have still been Nos. 1 and 2, respectively.
However, this would have vaulted Louisiana by 10 points to sixth from 11th place (and higher had it not lost those easy 15 STEM points), and Georgia would have fallen by 6.6 points from third place to seventh.
It turns out, Georgia and Louisiana were most affected by outliers. Georgia