My Pickleball Rating Is 3.551 on a 2-to-8 Scale: Is That Good or Bad?

I recently competed in a pickleball tournament and came away with a second-place finish!

Not bad, right?

Even better, my performance helped increase my pickleball rating slightly. It's still below my career high, but at least it's moving in the right direction.

My current rating? 3.551.

For those unfamiliar with pickleball, it's a paddle sport that combines elements of tennis, badminton, and ping-pong. And like many competitive sports, pickleball has a system for measuring players' abilities.

It's called DUPR, which stands for Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating. DUPR uses match results, opponent strength, and other factors to calculate a player's skill level on a scale ranging from 2.000 to 8.000. The higher the number, the better the player.

The world's top professionals occupy the upper end of that scale, although even they don't reach the theoretical maximum of 8.000.

So, where does my 3.551 fit? At first glance, not particularly well.

After all, 3.551 seems a lot closer to 2.000 than 8.000. And despite my recent second-place finish, I'm not even at my personal best.

But DUPR recently introduced additional statistics and analytics through its DUPR+ platform, including information about how players compare with others around the world.

And that's when I discovered something interesting.

My 3.551 rating puts me in the top 28% of players worldwide, according to my DUPR Global Percentile. In other words, approximately 72% of players in that comparison group rank below me.

Suddenly, 3.551 doesn't sound so bad. And, naturally, that got me thinking about the bar exam.

What Pickleball and the MEE Have in Common

On the Legacy Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE) and Multistate Performance Test (MPT) are graded using a system known as relative grading. Unlike an exam where a score of 80 means you answered 80% correctly, relative grading evaluates the quality of an examinee's written response in comparison with other examinees' responses.

Here's the important distinction: Your score depends not only on how good or bad your answer is, but also on how good or bad everyone else's answers are.

Imagine writing an essay that correctly identifies most of the major issues, states the governing rules, and provides reasonable legal analysis. If most other examinees produce weaker answers, yours might receive a relatively high score. But if most other examinees produce substantially stronger answers, that same essay might receive a lower score.

Your answer didn't change. The competition did.

As the National Conference of Bar Examiners explains in its article, "It's All Relative—MEE and MPT Grading, That Is," graders are trained to evaluate answers according to their relative strength. On a 1-to-6 scale, a 6 represents one of the strongest answers, even if it doesn't identify every issue or include every point in the grading materials. Conversely, an answer containing correct legal analysis could still receive a relatively low score if other examinees produce stronger responses.

I've written about this concept before in "What FSU's Snub from the CFP Can Remind Bar Examinees About Relative Grading" (Dec. 4, 2023) and "War! What Is It Good For?" (Nov. 12, 2021). Whether comparing college football teams, playing cards, or bar exam essays, the lesson is similar: Performance doesn't exist in a vacuum. How others perform matters, too.

Your Essay Doesn't Have to Be Perfect to Score Well

When reviewing practice essays, students often compare their answers against lengthy model answers and become discouraged by everything they missed.

But those model answers aren't the standard of perfection you must achieve to earn a high score.

A 4 on a 1-to-6 MEE grading scale doesn't mean you earned 66.7% of the available points. And a 6 doesn't mean you wrote a perfect answer.

What matters is the relative quality of your response. Identifying the major issues, accurately stating the governing rules, applying those rules to the relevant facts, and organizing your analysis clearly can distinguish your answer from others.

Of course, relative grading doesn't mean there is a predetermined percentage of examinees who must fail. Written scores are subsequently scaled, and passing depends on achieving the jurisdiction's required overall score.

The takeaway? Don't measure your practice essays solely by how far they fall short of perfection. Focus on making each response stronger.

3.551: More Than Just a Number

My DUPR rating is still 3.551. But knowing that it places me in the top 28% gives that number an entirely different meaning.

The same principle applies to bar exam writing. A number alone doesn't tell you how well you performed.

Sometimes, it's all relative.