Judge harshness rankings

Derek Hough sternest panel mean (7.817); Julianne Hough most generous (8.110); guests avg 8.614.

Ballroom Data · Artometrics-style report · Nov 3, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles)

Headline

Among long-running panel judges, Derek Hough is the sternest on average (7.817, 6.2% of marks below 6), while Julianne Hough is the most generous (8.110, 21.7% tens). The Carrie Ann–Bruno–Len trio still clusters tightly around 8.0.

Findings

1. Len and Derek sit slightly below Carrie Ann and Bruno.
2. Julianne (as judge) gives the highest share of 10s (21.7%) in a smaller sample (n=543).
3. Guest judges average 8.614 across 263 marks — higher than the panel’s typical level (see also story 10).

Methods & caveats

Panel set: Carrie Ann Inaba, Bruno Tonioli, Len Goodman, Julianne Hough, Derek Hough. Tone: descriptive, not personal. Anonymous “Judge 1–4” marks used only when named judges are absent for that performance.

Coverage: seasons 1–35; 3,602 performances; 11,027 individual judge marks in the cleaned Ballroom Data SQLite build (Nov 3, 2026, America/Los_Angeles).

Known gaps: Season 31 Mirrorball winner is not tagged as Winners in the performance table (Charli D’Amelio / Mark Ballas is missing from our winners extract). Seasons 33–35 largely lack Kaggle ages/hometowns. Season 35 celebrity names in the wiki scrape are often first-name-only or garbled. Dance-style strings still include some unclean variants. We never impute missing values.

Sources: howisonlab/dwts_dataset (GitHub); Kaggle brupley/dancing-with-the-stars-dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia DWTS season pages for seasons 32–35 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Scores are per-judge means on a 0–10 scale so 3-judge and 4-judge weeks are comparable. Marathons/relays/megamixes are excluded from style averages unless noted.

Disclaimer: Unofficial fan analysis. Not affiliated with BBC Worldwide, Disney, or ABC.

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