College Debate Ratings Updates

As the new season bears down on us, I've made a couple of updates to the ratings.


1.  Ratings for 2013-14: I've posted the ratings for the 2013-14 season and have begun to organize the site by yearly results.  Tabroom data goes back to the 2012-13 season, and I plan to download and process those results at some point in the near future.  The 2013-14 results are largely complete, but a small amount of data is missing (a couple of invitationals, regional qualifiers, and ADA).


2.  New Career Ratings: I've also added a new rating that charts progress across seasons.  A description of the Career Rating can be found in the FAQ.  In short, for the typical seasonal ratings, each debater starts the season with the default rating of 1500 and deviation of 350.  It makes no assumptions about each debater's skill level.  The career ratings, by contrast, use the previous season's rating & deviance for those debaters who are returning, while only assigning the default numbers to those who are not yet in the database.  Currently, the career rating is only available for the 2014-15 season, but will be a part of the new season and will be added to 2013-14 when the data from 2012-13 becomes available.


3.  Elimination of "Weighted" ratings: This actually happened some time ago, but I can make it official now.  The weighted ratings were an attempt to account for the difference in quality of teams at the beginning of the season.  I'm abandoning them for two reasons: 1) though the logic behind the weighted ratings was intuitive, the data suggested that the unweighted ratings actually performed nearly as well; 2) the new Career Ratings provide the same information in a more transparent way.  The weighted ratings were actually something of an attempt at a middle ground between the seasonal ratings and the career ratings.  They used teams' ratings from the previous year regressed to the mean but reset everybody's deviance.  Now the two different ratings are simply listed separately instead of trying to turn them into some makeshift hybrid.


EDIT: To clarify, the Career Rating is not a reflection of a team's peak.  Nor is it a "career achievement" style rating.  Rather, it is the rating that one has at the end of that specific season / scoring period.