How are contests scored?

Foundations of Amateur Radio The essential purpose of an amateur radio contest is to get on air and make noise. Each contest has a set of rules on how they intend to achieve this. An integral part of the rules is the idea that you establish a contact, a QSO, with another station and exchange some predefined information. Likely the callsign, a signal report and often something else, a serial number, the age of the operator, a maidenhead locator or the CQ or ITU zone. I'll race past the discussion around sending 5 and 9 as a standard signal report and move right along. To validate your activity, you record this information in a log and after the contest has concluded, you share your log with the contest organiser who collates and processes the submitted logs to determine a winner. As a participant you look for your callsign on the results page and if you're lucky you get some form of trophy, a certificate, a plaque, or more often than not, a PDF. An amateur radio contest is not a particularly high stakes competition. Recently I asked a group of contesters a question: "How do you learn why a QSO was excluded from your score?" I asked because one of the eight contacts I managed during a recent contest was disallowed, leaving me with an unexplained discrepancy between my log and the results. I will note that this entry didn't affect my ranking, I won my category, mainly because I was the only entrant - hah! Depending on whom you ask, this is either a simple or a complex question. The simple explanation states that if the contact isn't in the log of both stations it's not a valid contact. This interpretation was extremely popular in the group I asked. It was not the only answer I received. When I spoke with individual contesters they came up with different answers to my original question. For example, if I log everything right, if I'm using a serial number, the number increments each time and my log shows that, then my log entry should be valid, even if the other station didn't log it correctly. Note that I said log, not copy, as-in, they repeated back what I gave them, but logged it incorrectly. I also wondered what would happen if I was using a club-station callsign and accidentally called CQ with my own callsign and a station logged that callsign instead of the club-station. Should they be penalised because they logged what was actually exchanged? There's more. For example, what happens if the times are not identical? Based on the simple explanation, this would not be a valid contact, so you would not get recognition for this exchange and in some contests an invalid contact will produce a penalty to both stations. Another variation to the simple answer occurs if the contest organiser doesn't receive a log for every station and as a result, some contests set a maximum number of contacts for stations without logs. All this came within the context of attempting to discover how log validation happens, who decides what's valid and what rules are used. During my group conversation, two contest managers shared how they scored their particular contests and showed that they attempted to award the benefit of doubt to each station. One decided after the discussion to change their interpretation to the simple explanation I've already looked at. I wanted to know if there was any standard and other than pointing vaguely in the direction of a few large contests, I didn't actually manage to find any definitive discussion on how this works, if it's universal, which I suspect it isn't, and if it changes over time, which I know it does. The largest annual contest is the CQ World-Wide. In a 2012 blog post the contest committee discusses the time window of a contact and explains that they allow a 15 minute window, so as long as both contacts agree within 15 minutes, the QSO is allowed. That post also pointed out that if the time for one station was out by 45 minutes, none of their contacts would be allowed and anyone who made contact with that station would by implication get a penalty. Clearly there are variations on how this is handled. I asked if there is validation software for logs that checks this and if that software is open source so others can look at how decisions are made and see how these evolve over time. Is there an arbitration that goes beyond the standard phrasing in most contests: "The decision of the contest committee is final." I was told that this wasn't necessary and I should focus on more practice. I beg to differ. I've been contesting for a decade now, I have plenty of winning certificates on my wall. I'd like to improve my skill and I'd like to learn why and how my contacts are disallowed and I'd like others to be able to do the same. Log checking software is written by humans who interpret the rules and write software to conform to those rules. In order to see what rules are in place and to validate that, the source of that software must in my opinion be open and transparent. As a community we sit at the boundary between professional communications and a hobby and we often use the idea and concepts of a contest to argue that this is the best way to hone skills and to make you a better operator in case of an emergency, but if you cannot actually learn from your mistakes, if there is no discussion on how decisions are made, if there's nothing beyond simple answers, then are we really striving for improvement or just set in our ways? For the record, I think that if a contest log is off by 45 minutes throughout the entire log, software should pick that up, award the contacts and point out the mistake to the person who didn't set their clock correctly, especially since time is not exchanged during any contest I know. I also think that if a station logged what was actually said, there is room for that to be considered a valid exchange, but then I've only been an amateur contester for a decade, so I have plenty to learn. I'm Onno VK6FLAB