Glossary

This glossary defines the terms used throughout the MockScores documentation. Terms are grouped by where you encounter them.

Roles

Organizer — The person who creates and manages a tournament. Organizers configure the case, scoring, awards, and standings; add teams, scorers, and courtrooms; build rounds and pairings; and publish results. See the Organizer Guide.

Coach — A team’s representative. Coaches join a tournament by invitation, manage their roster, assign students to roles, and set witness call orders. See the Coach Guide.

Scorer (Judge) — A person who scores a trial. Scorers use a unique emailed link and do not create an account. See the Scorer Guide.

Presider — The scorer in a pairing responsible for running the trial and, when configured, selecting the trial’s tiebreaker winner. The first scorer added to a pairing becomes the presider automatically; an organizer can change it. A presider can be set to tiebreaker only, submitting a team selection instead of a scored ballot.

Delegate (co-organizer) — An organizer granted access to a tournament by the owner. Delegates use the organizer dashboard but cannot be the tournament owner. See Managing Teams and Organizers.

Owner — The organizer who owns a tournament. Only the owner can change tournament status or delete the tournament. Ownership of a team can be transferred to a joined coach from the team’s organizer view.

Tournament structure

Tournament — The top-level entity: a case format, scoring configuration, awards, rounds, courtrooms, teams, and scorers.

Case format — The case definition: prosecution/plaintiff and defense witnesses, swing witnesses, witnesses called per trial, and whether the case is criminal (which sets the Prosecution vs. Plaintiff label).

Round — A set of pairings in the tournament schedule. Pairings and results for a round can be published independently.

Pairing (matchup) — A single prosecution/plaintiff team versus defense team in a courtroom within a round.

Courtroom — A physical room or online meeting location assigned to a pairing. Assigning the same courtroom to two pairings in one round is flagged as double-booked.

Team code — A short identifier for a team, shown in pairings, scorer conflict checks, schedules, results, and standings. Defaults to the team name if left blank. Codes are intentionally used instead of school names on scorer screens.

Field — The set of participating teams and their codes and names. Coaches see this on the Field page.

Witnesses and roles

Swing witness — A witness that may be called by either side. Swing witnesses count as available to both sides when MockScores validates the number of witnesses called per trial. Common in AMTA-style cases.

Call order — The ordered list of witnesses a team will call, one witness per numbered position. Selecting a witness in one position removes it from the others so no witness is called twice.

Assignable field — A scoring field that a coach can attach a specific student to. Fields such as sportsmanship or deductions are usually not assignable.

Role — The label shown on the ballot for a scored item, such as Opening Statement or Direct Examination.

Scoring

Scorecard — The structured set of scoring categories and fields a scorer fills out for a pairing. The scorecard is the tournament-level configuration; a submitted scorecard for a specific pairing is a ballot.

Ballot — A single scorer’s submitted scores for one pairing, including any student assignments and award nominations. One assignment accepts only one ballot.

Combined scoresheet — A view of all submitted ballots for a pairing together.

Scoring category — A group of scored fields, such as Witnesses, Opening, or Professionalism. The witness category is generated from the tournament’s witness list and cannot be removed.

Multiplier — A factor applied to a field’s entered score when totals are calculated. It cannot be zero; a negative multiplier can be used for deductions.

Award category — A type of individual nomination a scorer may submit after a ballot, such as Best Attorney, with minimum and maximum nominee counts.

Nomination — A scorer’s selection of a student for an award category, optionally ranked when multiple students are chosen.

Standings and tiebreakers

For how each statistic below is calculated, with worked examples, see Mock Trial Scoring Metrics Explained.

Standings — The ranked list of teams computed from submitted ballots using the tournament’s standings configuration.

Standings configuration — The serialized rules (stored as a Lisp-like DSL) that define which statistics are calculated and how teams are ranked and ordered. Edited visually in Blockly or directly as DSL text. See Managing Tiebreakers.

Intermediate statistic — A value calculated at the pairing level, used as a reusable building block (for example, whether a round was a win). Intermediates are not aggregated onto the team row and cannot be referenced directly by a by tiebreaker rule.

Aggregated statistic — A value calculated across the whole tournament (for example, total points or ballots won). Only aggregated statistics can be used as tiebreakers.

Trimmed statistic — A statistic that removes a set number of values from each end before aggregating, used to discard high and low outliers.

Tiebreaker — A rule that orders teams still tied after the preceding rules. Rules are applied in priority order; the first listed is compared first.

Head-to-head (h2h) — A tiebreaker that compares tied teams using only the pairings in which they faced each other.

when-tied — A tiebreaker rule that applies nested rules only to tie-groups of a given size range, for example resolving only two-way ties with head-to-head.

Rank method — The policy for assigning rank numbers to teams still tied after every rule, modeled on pandas rank methods: average, min, max, first (default), or dense.

Presider selection — The presider’s recorded choice of which team should win a tied trial. It can be used as a statistic in standings when a tournament’s rules call for it.

Workflow actions

Publish pairings — Make a round’s matchups visible to coaches so they can prepare roles and call orders. One-way action.

Lock a round — Open scorer ballots for data entry. Locking prevents further coach edits and copies a team’s saved defaults into any pairing left unset. Permanent — a round cannot be unlocked.

Publish results — Release a round’s scores and ballots to coaches. One-way action, separate from publishing pairings.

Default assignments and default call order — A team’s saved starting roles and witness order. If a coach does not set pairing-specific preparation, locking the round copies these defaults into the pairing.

Getting Started — accessing MockScores by role
Frequently Asked Questions — common questions before and during a tournament
Managing Tiebreakers — the standings DSL in depth