Newbie Gaming: How Did UP Win the Cheerdance?

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Many are asking until today, "How did UP win the UAAP Cheerdance Com-
petition against the FEU Cheering Squad?" Read on.

Many got intrigued about a sudden announcement of ABSCBN Sports's Boom Gonzalez regarding how the ranking for the 2012 Samsung-UAAP Cheerdance Competition was made. To the shock of the FEU hopefuls, despite a late error from the UP Pep Squad, they still went on to beat the FEU Cheering Squad for UP's third straight cheerleading plum and 8th overall, making them the most bemedalled pep squad in UAAP right now. The talks have become more heated with NU people even joining the social media war after their basketball team crushed FEU's own cagers. The questions: How did UP win the cheerdance? What was this "ranking system" Boom was talking about?

For NBA fans, if this system seems familiar to you, this is the voting system that is used to determine the regular season most valuable player. It goes like this: the judges make their verdict of each team's performance based on the scoring system that was given to them. So that debunks the myth (incidentally also my hypothesis) that UP defeated FEU due to gut feeling. After counting the scores, the judges compare the 8 scores and rank the schools from there. The score collectors take all the judges' papers and compare each judge's ranking. The team with the most first place votes (i.e. the team who was ranked first by most of them) wins the contests, while the team with the most second place votes takes second and so on.

If in case of a tie for a certain position, the positioning will be determined by the number of votes in the next position (e.g. if there's a tie for first, the second place votes will be considered and if it's still tied, the third place votes will be tabulated and so on). However, in a 5-judge, 8-team ranking system, there's a possibility that a winner may not be crowned after exhausting all the possible tiebreakers (i.e. they counted the 8th place votes but it's still a tie), although the chance of such existence is very minute. If that's the case, then the scores (i.e. the scores the judges give prior to the ranking) will be added and the one with the most points wins. However, the judges may opt to disregard going to the votes for the lower rank and go straight to the total score if there's a tie in a certain rank.

A certain glitch, however, of the ranking system is that it's possible that a team will get a higher rank despite getting a lower average score than another team. Surprisingly, if there's a school that should be complaining about the ranking system, that should be UST and not FEU! The UST Salinggawi Dance Troupe actually got a better average score (85.56) than the NU Cheer Squadron (85.16) but Gawi fell to 4th because of NU getting more 3rd place votes (3-1-1-1; Julien LeBlond had the Ateneo Blue Babble Battallion at third, while Manuel Malonzo placed UST at a tie for third with the UE Pep Squad). The FEU Cheering Squad (91.36) would still finish 2nd to the UP Pep Squad (92.26) even if the ranking system was disregarded and the championship was based on the scores tabulated by the judges. The complete voting of the winners can be found here.