Ok Jerry, I was thinking cause you'd brought it up more than once that it was a big concern that needed looked into. I was thinking, well... they dq plenty without help!
Back when I wrote the website for the PA club, this scoring situation was something I considered , though never did I propose penalties. I remembered when I was new to 1k shooting, I thought it would have been nice to have information on targets even if they were dq's. Years later, when I wrote the website, it was written originally to take data from the then current scoring room application, and that was not complete enough to do what I wanted. Later, I re-wrote BOTH of them from the ground up, and added in the ability to track every shot by scoring ring. This both made scoring easier, but also allowing different criteria for the scoring. Also, a DQ category was added allowing the ability to score and group a target, but still DQ the person. That was not possible at first and so everyone with shots off just vanished from the results.
That probably sounds like some easy thing to do, but just trust me, that was a major re-write due to the data format. The current scoring now allows for people with less than 10 matches to be shown in the 10 match agg. People with less than 6 to be shown in the 6 match agg. People with less than 10 shots (or more) to be shown in the results with both a group and a score, (though we didn't group targets with too few shots). If you think about it, this is all that people want. They want to see WHAT they did alongside others, even if it was bad. The penalty thing is a bandaid fix for a problem that is probably being used because, scoring any other way does not fit the current system. If you think about that a bit, it's really true, even if they are not handcuffed by a computer program.
I see that GRRC emulated the scoring ring stats for this years IBS Nationals and I applaud them for that. Personally, I think it shows quite a bit about the real conditions, and also about who beat the conditions. On the PA site, it almost looks like a graph if you view it that way. Much more 'could' be done to make things nicer for the shooters, but even within the same organizations, there is so much difference in shooting format and scoring, it is impossible for anyone to do that work. And then at every rules change, much of it gets thrown away, creating huge amounts of wasted time with the swipe of a pen.
In my years scoring targets, I never found it so much fun that I would have wanted to do group size on a target that had shots off. I look at that as a huge waste of time. If the shooter wants to measure it, wonderful, use a ruler. I guess .001's don't matter if one shot isn't here anyhow. My thought were this. We count 10, so, go stick 10 shots on the paper and we'll score em.
