Discover new ways to elevate your game with the updated DGCourseReview app!
It's entirely free and enhanced with features shaped by user feedback to ensure your best experience on the course. (App Store or Google Play)
Just for argument sake lets say you have 100 reviews..............99 of them are between 3 and 5 give lets say an average of 4.2..................and then person gives a review of 1.........
You can go both ways...........100 reviews...........99 between 0 and 2.5............and one person gives it a 5
when there are only 5 reviews I agree......let them all come in, but when you have a lot of reviews with a small standard deviation and somebody pulls that you have to get rid of the outliers.
just my two cents
Great point!jimi hendrix was an outlier.
Your point about standard deviations raises an interesting idea. Only using ratings within a certain number of standard deviations from the mean would do exactly what you're suggesting. On courses with small numbers of ratings it would almost never come into play, same thing on courses with a wide spread of ratings already, but on courses with a strong consensus an outlier would be dropped.
Then again, that raises the issue (one I've personally seen, not just a hypothetical) of a traveling reviewer who plays an out of the way course that's received a bunch of high ratings from locals but doesn't stack up based on that reviewer's experience. Do we really want to drop that review?
I'm just trying to point out that outliers (and I understand the difficulty in policing this) should be stricken from the record.......just as they would in most statistical analysis...........thats all.
This runs of the assumption that the pissy course trasher reviewers only review courses once a certain number of "good" reviewers establish some sort of norm. What if the pissy course trasher reviewer gets there first.when there are only 5 reviews I agree......let them all come in, but when you have a lot of reviews with a small standard deviation and somebody pulls that you have to get rid of the outliers.
just my two cents
Until you have a significant sample size, you really can't tell if a review is an outlier (be it from pissy course trasher or a homer pumping their local course). I say let 'em stand - over the long haul, good courses rise to the top and bad courses get revealed.This runs of the assumption that the pissy course trasher reviewers only review courses once a certain number of "good" reviewers establish some sort of norm. What if the pissy course trasher reviewer gets there first.
The thing is that outlier review score will hurt a course with 5 reviews a whole lot more than it will one with 100.
A bigger issue than outliers in my experience is reviewers who post reviews just after a course's baskets are installed and don't go back to update their reviews once everything is in place. It's a rare course that opens with everything ready to go. In fact, as a designer I would downgrade a course that opened with cement tee pads already in place for being too eager to finalize the design before it had been tested with play. Likewise, only temp tee signs should be in place when a course opens in the event there will be tweaks. The more important signs when a course opens are directions to the next tee.
Our first post, we want to give a 'shout out' to Foundation Park in Centralia Iliinois. Our favorite in the St. Louis area thus far. 70 miles one way but worth the voyage. Especially appreciate the logical sequence of holes, the wide open spaces and an abundance of shade, which comes in handy this time of year. Nice park.
Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but I just noticed that Selah Ranch - Creekside topped them all, and it seems fitting that it was Martin's review that did it - his was the 20th review needed to qualify.
I noticed that this evening for the first time. I think it was only a matter of time based on what I have heard of Selah. Someday I will get to Texas and play it so I can add my review which will most likely only be 4.5 discs since I doubt it is a perfect course. I could be wrong, I have been wrong before.
Given the reviews I'd read, I too, was thinking it was just a matter of time. While ratings are admittedly subjective (your 4 may be my 5, and vice-versa), I think I've read enough to safely say Selah must have a couple of killer courses, and think I'd love to see them.