About this site

Methodology

Results are scraped from the public Texas UIL contest forms and stored in a database. Directors type their repertoire by hand, so the same piece appears under many spellings. Each entry's title and composer text is matched — exactly where possible, fuzzily otherwise — against an official Prescribed Music List code. Grades change and pieces are retired over time, so the matching is good but not perfect.

Reading the ratings

UIL ratings are ranks, not points: 1 is the best and 5 is the worst. Every chart on this site puts 1 at the top for that reason. A "sweepstakes" is a 1 in both concert and sight-reading.

Song score

Song score (0–100) grades a piece on how it has performed at contest. It blends two things: how much better or worse the piece scored than the average entry at the same contests, and how many times it has been performed. A piece that beats its field consistently across hundreds of performances scores high; one that did well twice does not.

For example, if the average rating at a 2006 contest was 1.6 and a piece earned straight 1s there, it outperformed the field by 0.6. The more performances behind that difference, the more it counts.

Known gaps

• Entries missing any of the eight individual judge scores are excluded entirely, so a handful of contests are under-counted.
• Pieces the matcher could not tie to a PML code still appear in the results table, but do not contribute to any song's statistics.
• Solo and small-ensemble events are out of scope — this covers full ensembles only.

Support

This is a personal project, maintained one season at a time. Support helps improve the matching, add features, and keep it running.