The Ratings Committee (RC) had a variety of tasks that it worked on throughout the year. The main tasks involved testing changes to the rating system, but given resource constraints only a minimal amount of testing was accomplished. Several minor tasks were carried out to completion, as we describe below. The RC was asked to examine several potential changes to the rating system. First, the committee was charged with investigating approaches to increase the K-factor for players in the 1800-2200 rating range. The basic method the RC proposed was to modify the formula for the .effective number of games. in the rating formula that would result in larger values of K in the desired rating range. After submitting a concrete proposal in October, 2010, the Board suggested different formulas in December to consider. To date, no further testing has been performed. The RC has also been asked to test approaches to aligning regular and Quick Chess (QC) ratings, but the feeling was that decisions about the K-factor needed to be made prior to working on the regular/QC alignment. These two tasks are at the front of the queue of issues the RC will be addressing in the coming months. In what has become a related issue, the Executive Board had been in discussions about the possibility of creating a master invitational rating system. The invitational system, which would have run in parallel with the current rating system, was designed for top players to produce reliable ratings that could be used to select players for invitational events. From the standpoint of ratings accuracy, the RC chair saw no problems with the proposal. The proposal then morphed into the USCF Invitational Rating system (UIR), which was also intended to be run in parallel with the current rating system. Ultimately, these systems were abandoned, and instead a modification to the existing rating system was proposed. The gist of the proposal is to lower the K-factor for players with ratings over 2400 for games played with time controls of G/60 to G/30, which is intended to minimize the results of quicker games that are regular-rated. The RC plans to address this as a component of the QC/regular rating modification testing. While the norm/title system is fully implemented, the RC addressed two outstanding issues related to titles over the past year. First, the RC had a vigorous discussion last year about norm eligibility in the case where a player competing in a 4-round event only plays three games. Some RC members argued that, to be eligible for a norm, a player must have played four games, and others argued that the player could play fewer than four games if the performance met the norm criterion acting as though the unplayed games were losses to low-rated players. The final decision was to create an exception whereby a player who was scheduled to play 4 games may have played only three, and the fourth unplayed game was either a bye or a forfeit win, then the player earn a norm if the score based on the three played games exceeded the usual criterion score by 2.0 points. This is equivalent to acting as though the fourth unplayed game was a .worst-case scenario,. that is, a loss against a player with an infinitely negative rating. From inspecting tournament results from the prior year, this exception only affected one player, so we expect this exception will apply extremely infrequently going forward. The second norm/title issue involved crediting players with appropriate norms and titles based on imperfect tournament and rating information prior to 1991. The RC chair performed some analyses based on post-1991 event results to determine the ratings at which there was a specified probability (such as 80%) of achieving norms/titles simply based on the player's rating alone, or based on the rating plus the frequency of competing. While it was understood that such information was generally useful, ultimately the problem was more complicated because players who might want to seek pre-1991 tournament credit were those who also have competed after 1991 as well. To our knowledge, the USCF is addressing this issue by responding to players who want credit for pre-1991 tournament results on a case-by-case basis, charging a research fee in instances where USCF staff needs to research tournament results. In March, 2011, the RC chair performed analyses to recompute the FIDE-to-USCF rating conversion based on the most current data available (consisting of players who have played 10 or more games on the FIDE list since January 2010, and 10 or more USCF regular games since January 2010). The analyses involved deriving a statistical relationship predicting average USCF ratings given players' FIDE ratings. The relationship was carried out separately for players under 20 years old, and over 20 years old. It was noted how poorly FIDE and USCF ratings correspond at lower FIDE ratings, so that the RC chair recommended not relying on the formulas to estimate a player's USCF rating based on low FIDE ratings. Based on these results, the Executive Board is in discussions about not USCF-rating players in foreign FIDE events unless their FIDE rating is at least 2200. The RC and the RC chair considered a number of minor issues throughout the year. Two issues are mentioned here. In July, 2010, the RC was asked its opinion on using the QC system to rate Chess 960 events. This question was motivated by what appeared to be a mistaken US Open ad that claimed Chess 960 games would be rated. The RC unanimously agreed that Chess 960 games should not be rated under an existing rating system. A second minor issue related to correspondence with the RC chair pointing out that the documentation providing approximation formulas to the implemented rating system misspecified the criteria for bonus point eligibility. The document was corrected and re-posted in December, 2010. Over the coming year, the RC chair will begin testing and optimizing a rating system that is closely related to the Glicko-2 rating system. This system is being analyzed for possible adoption by the USCF to address many of the ongoing problems with the current system. While thorough testing will be necessary and essential, the advantages of such a system include the following: (1) Each player would have not only a rating, but a measure of its reliability . players with reliable ratings will typically not change by large amounts, and players with unreliable ratings could undergo larger rating swings before stabilizing; (2) results against opponents with unreliable ratings would have very little impact on one's own rating; and (3) if a player had an unusually strong performance relative to his/her rating, the player's rating would be estimated to be less reliable, and the player's rating would increase by larger-than-normal amounts . in effect, a bonus-type mechanism would be an essential feature of the system. Testing is planned to begin over the summer. Each year the RC performs a set of diagnostic analyses to monitor trends in the rating pool. Overall rating levels have deflated from the mid-1990s through 2000 when rating floors were decreased by 100 points without a counteracting inflationary mechanism. With the new rating system implemented in 2001, ratings started to re-inflate. The RC has the goal of restoring rating levels back roughly to where they were at the end of 1997. The focus of RC work has been on players with established ratings who have been active over the current and previous three years and who are aged 35-45 years old in the current year. Based on the continued decline in ratings for this group, the RC recommended three years ago lowering the bonus point threshold from B=10 to B=6 to accelerate the re-inflation of the rating pool. This change was applied retroactively to the beginning of 2008. Over the past three years, the average rating for this group has increased 20 points in 2008, about 20 points in 2009, and only about 3 points in 2010. The average rating is currently about 40 points lower than the average rating at the end of 1997. Based on the modest increase in ratings for this group, the RC recommends keeping the bonus threshold at B=6 and continuing to monitor rating movement in this subset of players.