See a comparison between the two judging modes OpenWater offers.

Ranking is also known as a ballot. The concept behind ranking is any situation where you instruct judges to choose your top 5, or rank your preference from 1st place to last place, etc, etc. Submissions are stacked against each other instead of judged on an individual basis.

See below to see a ranking demonstration.

By default, OpenWater judging rounds are setup as an Evaluation Scorecard mode. If you are configuring a new round, you will first have to delete our sample question from the Evaluation Scorecard.

To remove the sample evaluation form question, first navigate to your program.

Very important, ensure you are viewing the correct round for your program, if you are running a multi-round program.

Under the Program Settings drop down menu, click Evaluation Form.
​

The default question is typically "How well did this applicant perform?" Go ahead and click Delete. 

In order to turn on Ranking Mode now that your evaluation scorecard has no questions, under Round Settings drop down menu, click Advanced.

On the next screen, tab over to the Advanced tab and then under Judge Evaluation Mode, select Ranking. Click Save.

Now that you have turned on Ranking Mode, hit F5 on your keyboard to refresh your page.

Under the Round Settings drop down menu, you should now see Rank Settings.

The next screen will allow you to choose various ranking settings that we offer.

Ranking Sets - The two options available are All Submissions Ranked Against One Another and Submissions Ranked within Category. If you have no categories, then the first option is your only option. Otherwise, the first option is more applicable if you have a "Best of Show" style, where submissions are compared against each other regardless of which category they were submitted to. However, if you only want to rank submissions against each other within the same category, choose the second option.

Require Judge to Rank All Applications for Scores to Count - Let's pretend that you instruct your judges to choose their top five favorites out of a pool of 30 they have been assigned to review. However, instead of choosing five, they only choose one. By only ranking one instead of five, that judge is preventing any other submissions from getting points, potentially giving that one ranked submission an unfair advantage. So if you prefer your judges to have to fill every slot on the 'ballot' rather than a choose up to five, then check this box.

Default Number of Submissions to Rank - This is the number of submissions your judges will be asked to ranked. If the number is five and they have been assigned 30 submissions to review, it will only allow the judge to select five to rank. If, however, the number of assigned submissions is less than the default number to rank, they can rank all the submissions available to them.

Override Number to Rank per Category
​We can go even one step further and say that our fictional Car category requires that you rank five submissions, but our fictional Truck category requires that you rank three submissions. You can do this by clicking Override Number to Rank per Category and then click Configure.
​

If you leave a category blank, it will default to the Default Number of Submissions to Rank.

Score Calculation
​Most important is the setting for Score Calculation. If the order of the ranking matters, such that 1st place is worth more than 2nd place, and so on, choose Based Rank Position. If the order does not matter, and it is mostly just choose your favorites, select Ignore Rank Position.