Forum Discussion
Microsoft Forms: Ranking question type calculation methodology
Kimberly_Huffman i dont know the official name, but i like to think of it as points. Eg you have 5 items to rank. And 3 people do the ranking:
A, B, C, D, E
A, C, D, E, B
C, A, B, D, E
Position 1 gets 5 points, position 5 gets 1 point. So add it up
A=14 points
B = 8
C = 12
D = 7
E = 4
So the ordering in the results page should show A as the winner, C as 2nd place, etc etc
While we order by total points, the bars are colored appropriately so you can see the breakdown within that score
Hope this makes sense!
Kimberly_Huffman i dont know the official name, but i like to think of it as points. Eg you have 5 items to rank. And 3 people do the ranking:
A, B, C, D, E
A, C, D, E, B
C, A, B, D, E
Position 1 gets 5 points, position 5 gets 1 point. So add it up
A=14 points
B = 8
C = 12
D = 7
E = 4
So the ordering in the results page should show A as the winner, C as 2nd place, etc etc
While we order by total points, the bars are colored appropriately so you can see the breakdown within that score
Hope this makes sense!
To be honest for this type poll, i'd rather that it did actual Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) or i at least had the option of making such a poll.
When results are shown and results are calculated as they are, my vote may not reflect my actual preference for strategic reasons.
Suppose we are voting for what do for a team building event.
Options are:
Go Cart, Ceramics or Escape Room
when i see poll standings are:
Go Cart - 20 points, Escape Room 19 points, Ceramics 9 points
My actual preferences are:
Ceramics, escape room and finally Go cart which i absolutely hate.
But in order to help avoid go cart id vote:
Escape room, ceramics, go cart.
When making poll add options and number of options to be chosen.
Eliminate least popular options adding people who voted for that option to their respective next priorities until only as many that are to be chosen remain.Jon_Kay Kimberly_Huffman
I know this is old, but I'm sharing for the Interwebs searches in the future.My ideal way of ranking needs to include the ability to NOT rank items you're not familiar with. (For example, ranking movies, you'd skip the movies you never saw, but you don't want that to affect your final score.)
To address this, you'd need a ranking system that allows a N/A option.
Then, voters rank.Then, you convert each voters' rankings into a win-loss set of "games".
For example, if someone ranks items ABCD as 1) A, 2) D, 3) C (with B not ranked), you'd list out the "games" as A beats D, A beats C, D beats C, with no "games" for B whatsoever.
Finally, you can use a sports-ranking method to take those games and produce a set of rankings. I like the Colley Matrix, but there are others out there.
Like I said, it's far more complicated, but it would allow you to properly rank items that have less general experience. I'll probably try to code this at some point in the future.Jon_Kay what happens if there are 2 candidates with same number of points ? How does the logic for deciding if a candidate’s rank should be higher or lower than the other with same number of points decided ?
Jon_Kay Yes that seems to be the case.
I was able to find a RCV tabulator. So for my purposes, I'm using the MS Forms Ranking question type to collect votes. When the voting is over, I will open the results in Excel, convert the ranked candidate cells to columns, save, and then use the RCV tabulator. It's going to be interesting to see if the results will be the same.
Thanks!
Kimberly_Huffman can you share the RCV tabulator you used? How did it turn out?
mrdlo Sure 🙂 I found a lot of great information and the tabulator at https://www.rcvresources.org/. We used the https://www.rcvresources.org/types-of-rcv-lib/single-winner-rcv. I downloaded and installed the https://www.rcvresources.org/rcv-universal-tabulator. It worked great. The tabulator is actually stored in https://github.com/BrightSpots/rcv/releases/ along with documentation. Good Luck!
~Kimberly
