Most of the time when someone gets top 8 at a NAC, they get an A! This is cool, however, how often are people upgrading their ratings rather than just renewing? I analyzed the number of fencers from each rating who got into the top 8, 16, 32, and 64, and the results are quite surprising. I specifically chose to look at Cadet and Junior, as those categories allow fencers of all ratings to participate and have a high enough number of each that the sample sizesample size the number of individual observations or data points collected from a population for use in statistical analysis or experimentation is good.
Note that the results from the fencers who got into top 64 also includes those in the top 32, 16, etc.
How often do lower fencers make it far?
D and below rated fencers almost never make it past the round of 32; their bars are almost invisible in the round of 8 and 16. This means almost all of the fencers in the video round at a national event are at least Cs.
How often can lower rated fencers get points?
For the sake of simplicity, I assumed that all events give points to the top 64, even though in reality smaller national events may only give points to the top 32. Below is the proportion of fencer ratings for those who get to the round of 64:
| A% | B% | C% | D% | E% | U% |
| 29.7 | 33.6 | 22 | 8.6 | 3.5 | 2.7 |
| A% | B% | C% | D% | E% | U% |
| 58.1 | 27 | 10.1 | 2.8 | 1.2 | 0.8 |
Unsurprisingly, lower rated fencers get points in Cadet more often because it’s easier than Junior. However, Us and Es are still very rare in the top 64 of Cadet: in an average tournament the top 64 would only have 2 Es and 2 Us.
View the full data here
