A travelogue has quite a few definitions in the dictionary, but is generally understood to be a personal account of a trip, journey or otherwise. It can be in the form of written notes, pictures, video or even lectures. Our Jury has been reading your travelogue with lot of interest. The impressions you shared about your drives and the depth of your chronicles carried more weight than just a regurgitation of names, places (around the world) and log of distances covered. The pictures were judged both for quality and relevance to your travelogue. Overall the travelogue served as “evidence” of your ability to take up the great driving challenge.

Talking of driving challenges (of the other kinds) on road, here is something to lighten you up.

(sourced from http://www.mchumor.com)

The Jury is pouring over several hundred applications that have made it to their dashboard (online), using a combination of the several cut-off-filters used (% completion, count of votes, testimonials etc). One of the things they are assessing is your “power to pitch”. Should you be selected as one of the TOP 3 contestants, your ability to communicate and pitch your story, will be a key factor in carrying your supporters with you all the way to the end.

The quality of your pitch is very important. Some people have the magical ability of saying it all in a few words, while others make a compelling statementl over 1-2 paragraphs. So the “length” of your pitch is certainly not a factor. This is the one section where you got a chance to talk to the Jury direct (in addition to your introduction of course) - this is where they sense the sincerity of your purpose, determine your approach and style, and factor in the maturity of your content. They grade your pitch power at 5 levels from ‘poor’ to ‘outstanding’.

Pitch power along with votes, makes up two (2) of the NINE factors that judges are looking at before deciding to shortlist a candidate.

More coming up soon.

It is a common observation in many real-life events (such as examination results, corporate performance grades etc) that data tends to cluster around a mean (average). In probability theory and statistics, the normal distribution or Gaussian distribution is a continuous probability distribution that describes data that clusters around a mean or average, and this is how the graph looks.

Inspired by the bell curve model, Team GDC analyzed the voting patterns of participants. We filtered out the spikes and anomalies (at the fringes) caused by false/maliciously engineered votes or lazy applicants who dropped out mid-way. Thus we were able to determine the number of votes (a band) that would determine ‘average’ performance’. If we marked this band as the ‘mean’, we could now move up/below the mean, assigning voting bands (a range of votes) where the performance could be considered below (or above) average, and following the same rational identify those who did poorly or excellent (compared to the median score of votes).

This is a kind of relative grading principle, which helps us neglect the ‘errors’ that otherwise creep in due to a few extra votes (duplicates from known friends) or a few misses (emails not confirmed). We are not in a position to share the bands, cutoff scores etc, and needless to mention the decision of the Jury is going to be final.

The jury is holed up in a hotel in Chennai, immersed in deep thoughts. They will be out Monday morning. As of now they are pouring over the applications, scoring people on multiple criteria, and calling for logs of those who have registered disproportionately high volume of votes in a short period of time.