Dancing with the Stars

This week's double elimination result on Dancing with the Stars was hardly a surprise to anyone, since the two who got eliminated, Penn Jillette and Monica Seles, received the lowest scores from the judges. On the other hand, finding out that teenage singers like the Jonas Brothers can actually be entertaining, now that's a shocker!

But every week, the hosts of Dancing with the Stars, Tom Bergeron and Samantha Harris, are always reminding us that the judges' scores are not the only factors that go into figuring out who will be booted off, which is why we have to get off our couches and call or text in our votes. The question is, how do they combine the judges' scores and America's votes?

Let's put aside all thoughts of heel-leading and death spirals, and do some quick math. Remember to show your work, or you won't get any credit for it!

The judges award each couple a score out of a possible 30 points for their performance. At the end of the night, all of the points awarded to all teams are added up, and the percentage of each team's score out of the total points is calculated.

Let me show you an example. Let's assume that only Marlee Matlin, Jason Taylor and Kristi Yamaguchi are left in the competition, and they each score 27, 28 and 26 points, respectively. The judges awarded 81 points for the night. To find, Marlee's percentage, 27 is divided by 81 to get 0.333, or 33.3 percent. Similarly, Jason gets 34.6 percent and Kristi gets 32.1 percent.

Now, let's factor in the voting. ABC collects all the votes cast during the evening and let's say that Marlee gets 25 percent of the vote, Jason gets 35 percent and Kristi gets 40 percent. Add up these percentages with the judges' percentage, like so:


Kristi has the highest total, so she comes in first, despite getting the lowest score from the judges. Jason comes in second, and Marlee comes in third.

Now, this week's Dancing with the Stars elimination was based on two weeks' worth of performances, so the judges' percentage was found by adding up each couples scores from both weeks, and then dividing that number by the total amount of points awarded in both weeks. Doing so, you get these numbers of the lowest scoring men and women:


In order for Monica to have had any chance at all of not going home this week, her share of the votes had to have exceeded Marissa's by more than 3.5 percent. If there were 10 million votes cast, then Monica would have needed at least 350,000 more votes than Marissa just to tie with her. I don't exactly know how many votes were cast, but in any case, Monica didn't get enough to stay in the competition.

I'll have to pay better attention next Tuesday in the second Dancing with the Stars results show. If we can find out the data on exactly how much many votes are being cast each week, then we'll be able to do even more fun stuff like making graphs and trendlines. Then, we'll really be cool!



-Debbie Chang, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: ABC.com
(Image courtesy of ABC)