Do you think gymnastics should have more than 6 judges to eliminate bias?

Question

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Answer 1

Yep, should be like a reality TV show, we all dial a number for our favourite competitor.  Or even better, we could evict gymnasts one by one!

Answer 2

Actually, I think that it is best that the judges not be from a country that hosts a gymnastics competition. 72 percent of the bias would be kicked out right there.

But there is also a major problem especially when gymnastics competitions occur in the Olympics. Bela Karolyi was definitely right about the major bias regarding the tiebreaker rule that denied Natasha Liukin the gold and gave her the silver instead. In my opinion, the problem is that there is the overlapping of two major organizations that cover deductions, code of points, and routines and stuff in gymnastics competition....the F.I.G....or the International Federation of Gymnastics, and then there is the International Olympic Committee rules. Looks like there is a bureaucratic discrepancy on the technicalities regarding ties in gymnastics, and which organization should supersede in regards to the competition rules. I think that was the major problem.....

Tim Daggett, whom I consider the "Cynthia Potter of gymnastics" (because I believe that he is the best gymnatics commentator in the world), is also right that there should be an end to unnecessary bias in gymnsatics judging...especially in the Olympics.

Answer 3

It's not about the numbers.  

They choose judges that are NOT from the athletes countries, so to eliminate bias.  The only problem is this:  some judges do not come from countries with good gymnastics programs, so they have bad scoring.

Answer 4

I don't think it matters how many judges there are.   Humans are just that, HUMAN.  As long as humans judge the sport there will be some bias, consciously and subconciously.  

Answer 5

No, more qualified judges, judges cannot be of the same country as competitors, this is flawed because you leaving out the best people and the ones that know the most about the sport.

Answer 6

Yes, you are absolutely correct.  Currently, the gymnastics committee attempts to eliminate outliers by dropping high and low scores, which is a good start.  But, having considerably more judges would reduce bias significantly.  There is a fundamental principle in statistics called the Law of Large Numbers which essentially states that the greater the number of data points you have, the more accurate your estimate is likely to be.  We leverage this principle in a wide array of fields from financial engineering to physics to even physical sciences.  This problem of bias is actually not unlike ones we statisticians are called in to solve on a regular basis.  Designing psychology, sociology, and other experiments present similar bias issues.  

Disallowing judges from competing countries is actually not even necessary if there is a large enough panel of judges, say 30 or 40+ judges.  Outliers could still be removed by dropping the lowest and highest couple of scores to eliminate intentional bias.  Having all of these top judges in the scoring process would also add to the quality of the scoring.

So, yes, you are correct that having a large number of qualifed judges would substantially improve the scoring.  You would make a good scientist with such intuitive insights.  Too bad the Olympics gymnastics committee does not share in your reasoning ability.

Answer 7

Definitely. Not just more, but better qualified judges. I mean, there will always be some kind of subconscious bias, but there should be ways to get around that.