Got a long list? 

Group Ranking is about to be your best friend.

Let’s say you’ve ridden quite a few coasters. You probably have some very clear preferences for your top ten, some relatively clear preferences for the next ten or fifteen… but wow, once you get past 25 or 30 rides, the rest of them get a bit fuzzy. There are lots of good ones, some mediocre ones, and some that are just ‘there.’ Maybe there are a few you’d rather not remember. Ranking that big block of coasters in the middle and lower tiers is tedious at best. If you’re up to ranking all of them individually, GOOD FOR YOU!!! But if you’re not, take a long hard look at Group Ranking.

HOW IT WORKS

First, get your ballot and rank as many coasters as you want. Instructions for doing that can be found on the Ballot Page. Once you’ve done that, come back to this page.
Got it? Good. Here we go…

The fictional voter here was lucky enough to have ridden every wood coaster on the ballot. That’s fantastic, but it makes the ballot very time-consuming and to be honest, this voter is having a difficult time deciding on clear preferences after #30.

So the voter decides to put the remaining coasters into groups and gives each group its own rank. The voter decides on five groups:

1. This coaster is really good and I’ll try to get a ride every time I visit that park.
   All the coasters in this group get ranked 100.

2. This coaster is good and I’ll ride it if the queue isn’t too long.
   These get ranked 200.

3. This coaster is OK. I might ride it or I might not.
   These get ranked 300.

4. This coaster isn’t that great. I might ride it if the person I’m with wants to.
   These get ranked 400.

5. I don’t like this coaster and will probably not ride it again.
   These coasters are left alone, since “0” ranked coasters are treated as last place rankings.
   No need to take the time to assign numbers to these!

You can make as many groups as you like and bundle them into whatever category you want. Perhaps you only want three groups. Maybe you want ten. Doesn’t matter.
Re-sorting the list with these new groups gives you something like this:

And you’re DONE! That’s literally all there is to it.

Now, you might look over your groups and think, “OK, all those in that first group are really good, but there are one or two that edge out the others, and another one or two that are slightly less good, but still deserve to be in that group. That’s an easy fix. Change the rankings of the slightly-better ones to 99, 98, 97 etc and the slightly-worse ones to 101, 102, 103, etc.

WHY THIS WORKS

The way the tabulation program processes ballots, it will rank (in this voter’s case) the coasters at 1-30 as you’d expect. It doesn’t matter that the next ranking is #98, since the tabulator only looks at whether a coaster “wins” or “loses” its comparison to another coaster - it does not look at the margin the coaster “wins” or “loses” by. So the actual number of the rank doesn’t affect anything, it only matters whether the rank is higher or lower than the coaster it’s compared to.

In the example above, all the coasters ranked 100 will “tie” with the others in their group. They’ll “lose” to the ones ranked with numbers lower than 100 and they’ll “win” against coasters ranked with numbers higher than 100.

By using a group ranking method, you can speed through a long ballot in no time flat!