Measuring Sources of Bias in Diving Competitions

We examine bias in diving scores from high school meets. Usually, examination of bias in sports where judges assign subjective scores has been examined in terms of nationalistic bias, where judges award favorable scores to athletes from their own home countries. In this work, bias is defined as difference between the judge's scores for a given meet and the ability of the diver. As a measure of the ability of a diver, we calculate a mean score for all dives and all meets in which the diver has participated. We call this mean score a diver's competency score. We use the difference between judges' scores within a given meet and the diver's competency to define a discrepancy: the difference between a judge's estimation of a diver's ability and their true ability. We examine this discrepancy with respect to age, gender, direction of dive, position of dive, round of competition, and dive difficulty.