Award Level Calculator
Set the ladder, see where the field lands
At a dance studio competition the level usually matters more than the placing. Fourth place depends on who turned up; platinum depends on how the routine went. That makes the threshold ladder one of the most consequential decisions an organiser makes — and it is normally made blind, then discovered on the day. This tool makes it visible in advance: enter your thresholds, paste the scores you expect, and see how many entries land on each level.
The thresholds belong to your competition. The ones below are a starting example, not a standard.
- Platinum ≥ 951
- High Gold ≥ 903
- Gold ≥ 853
- High Silver ≥ 802
- Silver ≥ 702
- Bronze ≥ 01
- No award0
| Entry | Level |
|---|---|
| 96.5 | Platinum |
| 94.2 | High Gold |
| 91.8 | High Gold |
| 90.4 | High Gold |
| 88.7 | Gold |
| 87.1 | Gold |
| 85.5 | Gold |
| 83.9 | High Silver |
| 81.2 | High Silver |
| 78.6 | Silver |
| 74.3 | Silver |
| 68.9 | Bronze |
Learn more
Setting a ladder that actually separates
A ladder has two failure modes and both are quiet.
Set too low, and everyone gets platinum. The level stops carrying information, and the studios notice within one season — an award every entry receives is not an award.
Set too high, and the bottom of the field goes home with nothing. Sometimes that is the intent, and this tool does not argue with it: a ladder without a tier starting at zero deliberately declines to give everyone a level. But it should be a decision, not a surprise.
The calculator flags both: if every entry lands on one tier it says so, and it counts entries that reach no tier at all rather than hiding them.
Thresholds are yours. Every competition brand runs its own, they differ by a few points, and there is no governing body that sets them. The ladder loaded here is an example to start from — named as an example, not as a default, because the product does not know what your competition should do and has no way to know.
Reading the output
The distribution panel shows every tier with the number of entries that reached it, including tiers nobody reached — an empty tier is information about the ladder, not something to hide.
Below it, each score is matched to the level it earns. Names are shown exactly as you typed them: if your competition awards a Director's Cup rather than a platinum, that is what appears, here and on the results screen. Award names are often part of the brand, so the product does not translate them or force them into a fixed set.
What this tool is and is not
It runs the same functions that assign levels in a live JudgeMate competition, so a routine that lands on gold here lands on gold there.
What it does not do: decide the ladder for you, or produce the scores. It takes the numbers your judging produced and shows the consequence of the thresholds you chose. It also does not rank — level and placing are different answers to different questions, and a competition can publish both.