How would you have done this?
A local newspaper asked its readers to rank the year's Top 10 news stories
by completing a ballot form. There were 10 choices on all but one ballot
(i.e. local news, sports news, business news, etc.), and you had to rank
those from 1 to 10 without duplicating any of your choices. One was their
top pick, 10 their lowest. Only one ballot had more than 10 choices, because
of the large number of local news stories you could choose from.
I would have thought if you only had 10 choices and had to rank from 1 to
10, then you'd count up all the stories that got the readers' Number One
vote and which ever story got the most Number One votes would have been
declared the winner.
Not so in the case of this newspaper . so maybe I do not understand
statistics. The newspaper told the readers there were several ways it could
have tallied the rankings. The newspaper decided to weight everybody's
responses and gave each first place vote a value of 10, each second place
nine, each third place eight, and so on. They then added together the values
for each story and then ranked the stories by point totals.
So is this an accurate way to have tallied the votes? And why weight them
since the pool in all but one category only had 10 items to choose from?
Thanks!
Ralph Noble
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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