®| ® |
|
|
|---|
Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
This bulletin was provided for information for attendees at the April Council meeting.
Last September when Roger Edwards was re-elected Grading Director, he made it clear that he would only continue as Grading Director provided he was allowed to revert to the use of pre-Chris Howell software.
In the morning prior to Council, the Management Board considered Roger's report and came up with the following informing Council of its decisions:
Council accepted these proposals.
The Grading sub-committee resolved that it would be possible to operate a hybrid approach using both the "Howell" and the "Pre-Howell " (or "Patti") systems. This will have the benefit that additional checking of submitted Grading results will be possible without any essential change in the format in which local Graders are asked to submit results. Essentially, individual Grading results submitted will be converted to a Grading performance (X Games, Y Points) with the first stage of the Howell software. The Grading performance data will then be converted from Access to dBase, which will be compatible with the pre-Howell Grading computation software. The hybrid Grading system may produce a slightly different Grading calculation result to the Howell in some circumstances (e.g. for new players, or where a player plays insufficient games in a season and results from a previous season are carried over).
The working party also made a number of recommendations intended to ensure the success of the August 2001 Grading list. The main philosophy was to head off the problems that were experienced in the 1999/2000 Grading cycle when everything came to a head all at once when it was far too late.
Despite the fact that the working party had accepted the approach proposed by Roger Edwards, he in fact resigned the Directorship in October, citing abusive correspondence as the reason for doing so.
The Management Board made the following decisions:
Since November, I have provided a monthly progress report. This can be found on the BCF Website and is also circulated via an e-mail Grading Forum run by Richard Haddrell. Specific information sent to Graders includes:
It was decided not to produce an updated Junior in January. However, if the Grading process works well this season, it should be possible to produce six-monthly Junior lists starting in 2002. This will be reviewed at the September Council meeting.
An updated Master List has been provided to local Graders on CD-ROM. This list was produced using the hybrid approach confirming its feasibility.
Although it is not intended to publish future annual Grading lists on the BCF website, it was decided by the Management Board that a list of significant amendments would be published on the BCF Website. The amendment list is a recalculation of the list published in August 2000 and republished in September 2000 with addition of some results omitted from those lists and the correction of further errors. It does not incorporate any results from the 2000/01 Grading season. Changes in Grade of less than 5 points have been omitted from this amendment list.
The documentation defining the format for Grading submission files has been updated to correct errors and provide clarification.
A data checker for submission files has been developed by Howard Grist and has been provided to all Graders. There are two versions, one that can check spreadsheets and requires Excel 97 to be installed on the machine, and one that just checks text files, which requires Windows 95 (or later). The hard disk requirements for the Checker are about 10Mb, plus 5Mb or so for the indexes on the .dbfs (which are optional). In addition to Howard's work developing the Data Checker, I should like to acknowledge the contribution of Richard Haddrell, who beta tested the program and documentation for us.
As an exercise, we processed all last season's files through the checker. The failure rate was over 90%!
With the updated Master List, the opportunity was taken to provide local Graders with the following software:
I should like to acknowledge the assistance of Bruce Holland with this activity.
Last season, the Grading process was bedevilled by players getting multiple entries because they were erroneously thought to be new. To obviate this, a manual process has been put in place to confirm that new players really are new. This is probably the least satisfactory part of this year's Grading system in that it is typically taking a month to conduct a check and provide either the correct Grading reference or a new Grading code. The delays are because of the large quantity of requested codes (often more than 400 players in one request). While the timescales are frustrating for the local Grader, the payback will be the removal of problems from the central database in the critical period between June and August and so a successful Grading list. I will review whether this process can be streamlined after August.
Last year, not many Graders received error logs due to the processing time involved. We are still investigated the best method to streamline this process so that we can provide feedback to Graders on what we think they have submitted. As a minimum, feedback from the pre-Howell system will be provided.
Looking forward - why should this year's Grading list be a success? The reasons that we should get a successful Grading list this year are as follows:
The following longer term Grading issues have been identified:
In conclusion, I should like to thank the efforts of the Grading Team of Roger Edwards, Richard Furness, Howard Grist and David Thomas.
C E Majer Acting Director of Grading 20/04/01