Rating Systems Explained

Teams in league sports often play balanced schedules. For example, in each season of the English Premier League, each football/soccer team plays each other team in the league exactly twice - once at their home stadium, and once at the opposing stadium. That way, at the end of the season, you can merely look at the record of wins, draws, and losses to determine which teams have done the best, second best, and so on. This works because everyone has had the same opposition, so wins against that same opposition are comparable.

But what would happen if different teams played different opponents, or even different numbers of matches? This is exactly the situation in many eSports, as well as chess; individual players may play different amounts of time against completely different opponents. To compare competitors in such as situation, we can use a rating system.

 

Reflection on an undergrad/grad crosslisted design of experiments course

 

I'm looking to re-examine and improve my teaching since I started working as a professor again for the University of Waterloo, and part of that means writing reflections on courses again. This one is for a 4^th year / graduate level crosslisted course on design and analysis of experiments.