Guest judge inflation

Guests avg 8.614 vs panel 7.96 on non-guest nights (263 guest-tagged dances).

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

Headline

On nights with a guest judge, guests themselves average 8.614, while the standing panel averages 8.42 on those same nights — versus 7.96 for the panel on non-guest nights. Guest-tagged performances in this build: 263.

Findings

1. Guests run warmer than the panel.
2. The panel is also slightly warmer on guest nights (selection: often theme/finale energy), so not all of the bump is the guest’s pencil.
3. Within-season contrasts vary; see the by-season chart.

Methods & caveats

Guest = any named judge outside Carrie Ann, Bruno, Len, Julianne, Derek. America’s Score and anonymous Judge 1–4 excluded from the guest set.

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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