Hucks...
Congratulations on that national championship!
You are correct. A decile is dividing into equal tenths. (Quartile is 1/4s, quintile is 1/5s). By definition, the 5th and 6th decile are average. Depending on how normal the distribution is, 4th and 7th deciles can probably be described as average as well.
Why is it helpful to go through the exercise of ranking the courses in an are you are familiar with by decile? Because you HAVE to say 10% are the worst 10% and you have to say that 10% are the best. Try it. You'll have trouble getting it down. Took me a little over 90 minutes to do Orlando's 100 courses that I'm familiar with.
Saying that something is in the 8th decile makes it sound like it is really bad. But if you like golf, you'd still enjoy playing it.
Someone on this board would not back down from his statement that Fiddler's Elbow is "average". I asked if he meant average out of what he'd play, reasoning that most of us skew our golf to the average and above courses and could lose touch with what a truly dreadful course really is (9th or 10th decile). Because he stuck to saying that Fiddler's - a very good course in the overall scheme of thinks but deficient in some areas necessary to be ranked - is average, I knew he didn't seek out and evaluate junk versus junk. Bonds are ranked AAA, AA, A, BBB, and junk. But if you look closer, you'd see that junk has many different levels! (BB, B, CCC, CC, C, etc...)
I like using a Doak reading for the truly elite. 6-10 are courses that are real good. With over 10,000 courses in Amerca, the Top 100 lists contain less than 1% of the population. Does it make sense to use that as the scale for most courses? NO.
Those who detest Pelican Hill, which I again remind you I have not seen, are comparing it to the 1%ers. Slide the scale down and look at it compared to average and I GUARANTEE it CANNOT fall below 6th quintile. 40% of all courses HAVE TO BE worse than it. As you said, 3rd decile - 71st to 80th percentile for you standardized testers - is likely. Even its critics couldn't put it much below that.
I think I'll start another thread on deciles. It is a much more meaningful and inclusive way to look at golf courses that lay outside of what the magazine rankings pick up.
Thought: For those who live in a small midwestern town with only one 9-hole option, a day at Pelican Hill signals the culmination of a fantasy.