This past year probably has been the most active time for the Ratings Committee in recent memory. The Committee has had an unusually high degree of output this year, and this is due in no small part to committee member Tom Doan. The USCF owes a great debt to Tom's volunteer efforts, and the Committee is extremely thankful for his unsolicited but significant contributions. The most noteworthy accomplishment this past year has been the implementation of the new rating system. The new rating system was officially proposed as a motion in 1997 and adopted by the delegates at that time, but the system was never implemented. The reason seems to have been a combination of understaffing at the USCF office and lack of finances to fund the system's implementation. Fortunately, Tom Doan offered to write the program himself, and in conjunction with Laura Martz at the USCF office managed to implement the code which is currently rating USCF rated events. The new system replaced the old system this past January. The key features of the new system are * a new method for determining provisional ratings. In most cases, the formulas would produce a rating that is identical to the old system. But when opponents' ratings are far from a player's pre-event rating, or when they are widely dispersed, the new formulas appropriately use information from results against such opponents to produce an updated rating. Also, the new system uses age-based imputed ratings (in most cases) to rate games between unrated players. * a bonus point mechanism for tracking quickly improving players. The standard formula for updating ratings has been adjusted to account for unusually strong performances in an event. When a player's results exceed the expected result beyond a certain threshold, bonus points are added to the ordinary rating gain. The threshold depends on the number of rounds in an event. The bonus point mechanism only applies if the player completes three or more games, and if the player competes against each opponent no more than twice. * a "sliding-K" scale to account for more variable player abilities when players have low ratings or when players have not played many tournament games. The value of "K" in the standard rating formula can be thought of as a measure of uncertainty in a player's pre-event rating. The higher the value of K, the greater the impact of a tournament result and the less reliance on the pre-event rating. The revised rating system therefore uses values of K that are large when a player is low-rated or when the player has not played in many USCF-rated games to reflect the greater uncertainty in such players' abilities. * a revised iterative procedure to rate an event. Rather than performing a single rating calculation for each player when rating an event, the revised system performs two calculations for previously rated players and three for unrated players. In effect, the rating calculations are performed once to produce a set of intermediate ratings, and then the rating calculations are performed a second time using the intermediate ratings as the opponents' ratings to produce a final rating. The main benefit to this procedure is that the results of opponents' games are now incorporated into a player's rating calculation. If an opponent has a low pre-event rating but performs well in an event, the revised rating system will adjust the calculations to recognize that the opponent is probably better than the pre-event rating indicated. This is particularly useful as a "feedback" mechanism to bonus points. A document describing the exact details of the rating system are available on the USCF web site at www.uschess.org/ratings. The document was written jointly by Committee chair Mark Glickman, and Tom Doan. To assist players in approximating their rating updates after a tournament based on the new rating system, two documents have been written. First, Committee chair Mark Glickman wrote an article for the October 2000 issue of Chess Life that describes an approximation formula, based on the computations of the old system, that allows players to perform rating calculations to estimate their updated ratings. The second document, based on the Chess Life article, is a web-accessible description of the approximation formulas. It can be found on the USCF ratings web site at www.uschess.org/ratings. The USCF office is currently preparing fliers describing the new rating system, again based on the October Chess Life article, that they plan to send to players upon request. Finally, the Committee appreciates the contribution of George John, who implemented a Java ratings calculator based on the new system. The calculator is now accessible from the USCF web site, or directly at http://texaschess.org/perfrate.html. Besides implementing the new rating system, one of the main activities for the Ratings Committee was to respond to a proposal put forth by the so-called "DDDE" Committee. The proposal, whose goal was allegedly to increase tournament activity, called for the addition of 2 rating points per game played for players rated under 2400. The proposal was formally presented to the Ratings Committee in September 2000. The Committee was asked to respond to the proposal by evaluating its likely effect on the rating system. From both a conceptual standpoint, as well as based on computer simulations, the Committee concluded that these frequency-based activity points would contaminate the rating system, rendering ratings virtually useless. A copy of our report can be obtained at http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/ratings/ddderesp.html. Despite the Committee's recommendation not to adopt this proposal or any close variant, the Executive Board decided to adopt the proposal with minor variations by a 5-2 margin. In response to the decision, the Committee wrote a letter to the editor of Chess Life admonishing the decision of the Board. Based on feedback to this letter and from other sources of pressure, the Board was willing to consider alternatives to the slightly modified DDDE proposal. With the help of Kevin Bachler, Tom Doan, and George John, the Committee chair proposed a compromise with three alternative recommendations. This compromise proposal was offered in mid-January. The Board decided to accept the alternative motion that the Ratings Committee favored, namely to lower the threshold for bonus points in the rating system's bonus formula. This change is in effect until January 2003. The new rating system is now implemented with this change, and the documents describing the workings of the rating system reflect the compromise. Additionally, as a result of these discussions, the Committee agreed to modify the criteria for bonus point eligibility to include events of three rounds (in the original version of the system, bonuses were only eligible in events of at least four rounds). The Committee has had several minor issues discussed throughout the year. One important topic was whether to adjust players' ratings when converting to the new rating system. Some Committee members argued for adjusting ratings upward to account for some inferred amount of rating deflation over the last several years. Others argued against, for a variety of reasons, including the confusion that adjusting ratings would potentially cause. Ultimately, it was decided that ratings would not be adjusted, and that the new rating system with its anti-deflationary mechanisms would increase ratings to levels comparable to 1996. This conclusion was determined by computer simulations run by Tom Doan. One of the priorities for the Committee is to implement diagnostics to monitor the rating system. Discussion over the past year focused on identifying subpopulations of players, based primarily on age, that would provide information on the stability of the rating system. Particular measures will be the topic of future work. The Committee also plans to address potential adjustments of Quick Chess ratings to align them with the standard rating system, and to work with the USCF office in promoting and implementing the USCF Lifetime Achievement system, which was approved by the Delegates in 1998.