My New Rating System

[Kyle Harris]

I am slowly ironing out the kinks of a new rating system I will be using for the courses I've played.

It's based on a system by which I compare the quality of a golf course based on the quality of the other courses I've played. The score is reported by giving the number of Standard Deviations from a preestablished "zero" golf course.

The "Zero" golf course is a golf course with a course score of "0." Meaning that the golf course is better than 50% of every course you've played. For me, that golf course is Five Ponds, a local muni with some architectural merit.

A course rating of '1' would indicate that the golf course is better than roughly 83% of every golf course you've played because at one Standard Deviation from the Mean, 83% of a sample set would be covered. A '-1' would similarly indicate a course that is only better than 17% of the courses you've played.

This is a weighted scoring system and the higher the rating, the lower the relative difference between courses. For example, a rating of 3 would indicate a course that was better than 97% of courses played, while a score of 2 would indicate something better than approx. 91%. So the relative difference decreases as the score gets higher, much like the Doak Scale.

Levels of precion would also change with the sample set. A person having played only 20 courses would have no need for any decimal places. My own set of approximately 80 courses will be measured to the tenths place.

Would anybody be willing to offer up some good "zero" courses and start using the scale?

If anything, I'd like to get a discussion going on "average" golf courses, and where everyone's opinion of that lies.

[Dan Kelly]

This sounds too much like -- in the word of Maynard G. Krebs -- WORK!

But to each, his own!

[Kyle Harris]

Haha, it is at first, but when you get everything set... kinda puts every new course into a nice mesh.

The Mike Cirbas of the world who've played darn near half the golf courses out there could probably spend weeks on this.

[Bill Gayne]

Kyle,

It sounds a lot like the BCS  .

[Mike_Cirba]

Kyle,

My head hurts.

Seriously, I think there is a basic flaw in your system.  It's simply that your "control group" of courses played is not static, so once you rate a course, it's over and done and effectively invalid by the time you play your next course...especially if the overall class of courses you have played changes markedly over time.

For instance, if the first 100 courses I played were mostly the Rolling Meadows and Shadowbrooks and pre-Ault Mountain Valley's, then a Wyncote would probably get a 2.  

However, if the next 100 courses you played were Pine Valley, Cypress Point, etc., then Wyncote would surely not be a 2, yet what mechanism would you have to adjust for this fact?

To be entirely consistent, you'd have to re-rate each and every course every time you played a new one(s), depending on the overall size of your golf course sample.  

Besides, can you really at this point decide which is better; Rolling Meadow or White Birch??  

[Kyle Harris]

Mike,

Hehe... that's why it's primarily a personal system. I figured most people on here have a fairly large breadth of courses played by which they could have meaningful results, and most interesting is trying to come up with an "average" course that isn't just "bad" or "worse than X Course." It's proactive in that sense in that you actually have to think what mediocrity is. Something tells me that most posters on this site know a good course when they see it.

I feel the system has merit in that you can assign a range of categories to courses in lieu of actually ranking them. i.e. Courses between 1-1.5, etc.

Naturally, I'd use the second half of the curve more than the first, much like the Doak Scale does. By my system, I'd imagine my "zero" course would fall around a Doak 3.

I've been toying with just using a percentile score instead of the Standard Deviation number. Saying a course is better than 90% of other courses or something. It's all very rough, I know. I just feel it's dumb to list a ranking. I am content to lump my experiences as comparable. My system, I feel, isn't bounded by "Top 100" etc. If I feel a course is better than another, it just needs a higher rating. There is no max or min.

Also, to me at least, fine tuning the ratings gets me thinking about golf courses and their merits and values every now and then. Probably something I could do over the long, harsh, winters of Pennsylvania.   Sure beats shooting 55 at TOC on Tiger Woods 2006.

P.S. I can take you to many a bar in Schuylkill County where the White Birch v. Rolling Meadows debate goes on for hours.

[John_Conley]

Kyle:

I have my personal "decile" system that forces me to assign all courses in an area to a decile.  Many on this board decided that it either 1) was too much effort to differentiate between mediocre courses, or 2) gave too much attention to average courses when all they were worried about was the elite.  HOWEVER, those who live in Orlando have almost universally loved it because it does a great job of discerning between the golf choices.  They can then overlay their own "value" scale to decide where to play.

If a new course opens and everyone is talking about it, I think you have a right to know if it is in 5th decile or 3rd.

Probably works best regionally where it forces an absolute standard.  So much of describing a course is subjective.  "Pretty good" and "not bad" mean different things to different people.  Even worse, they can mean different things to the same person in different contexts.  Pacific Grove Muni is revered by some on here, some of whom are no doubt "disappointed" from their first visit to a course like Pebble Beach or Spyglass.  This happens when expectations are introduced.

Keep on doing what you are doing.  If it works for you that's all that matters.

[Rob_Waldron]

Kyle

You and Jonathan Cummings need to be locked up in a room. Only one can leave. I am not sure that the door would ever re-open.

[John_Conley]

If anything, I'd like to get a discussion going on "average" golf courses, and where everyone's opinion of that lies.

Kyle, take everything in your area and it is either the 5th and 6th decile or the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th.  No discussion needed.  That's average.

[John_Conley]

Who says golf course distribution follows a bell curve?  It is more likely an even distribution.

[Kyle Harris]

John,

Nobody. Just an assumption I'm working off of.

I also meant which courses fall under the "average" label.

[Jonathan Cummings]

Interesting system.  I've always thought applying a bell curve weighting to handicaps would reduce sandbagging.  Not so sure about applying such a system to course ratings though...

Now Rob, you are probably right!

JC

[Andy Troeger]

Kyle...interesting system. I developed my own (which I put into a spreadsheet so that I don't have to think every time). I rate each course on criteria (not evenly weighted by any means) and it comes out to a score from 1-100. To me the completely average rating is a 5 out of 10...50 points total, but after going through it for every course I think my average ended up at maybe 55. Scores thus far range from 8.67 to 96.8. The grand majority of courses range from 30-80.

For interests sake...the six criteria are shot values, conditioning (meaning does the golf course play as one would think it should architecturally...not just is it green), aesthetics, fun, memorability, and the finishing holes. If I remember right SV, memorability, and fun are my most important categories with finishing holes by far the least (but worth a few points, I always am frustrated when finishing on a lousy finisher on a good course).  I don't pretend its the end all system, but I found it fits my personal feelings toward golf courses pretty well

And Kyle...I agree, with Pennsylvania or Indiana winters there has to be something golf related to think about right?

[Craig Sweet]

I prefer to use the beer system for rating. A course that holds my attention and is fun to play is generally a 2-3 beer course. A boring course, with little architectural interest or fun holes, is a 4-6 beer course, a fun and highly interesting course is a zero beer course.

 

[RSLivingston_III]

Has anybody suggested doing courses by rating each hole on a 1-10 scale (I was thinking linear, not Doak) and adding up the total. A perfect course would be 180. I guess if you initially underestimate a "10" you could even go higher....

[Jonathan Cummings]

Hickory Ralph - Tom D and Adam C have yelled at me when I suggested a similar system - straight adding up hole scores misses "the sum of the parts".  Cypress is certainly better than the sum quality of its 18 holes.  You know I think they're right too.

JC

[RSLivingston_III]

Would it make more sense to do it for the head-to-head comparisons? Comparing the 1st to the 1st, 2nd to the 2nd, etc... doesn't seem like it would give an accurate assessment. The wrong line-up of strong and weaker holes can really skew the scoring. It also doesn't seem fair to compare holes of different pars. A total score to score seems more accurate. Any thoughts?
 

[mike_beene]

Somehow Auburn is going to get screwed.

[Kyle Harris]

Somehow Auburn is going to get screwed.

Good.

Roll Tide.