Every report a golfer files is scored 0 to 100 on the turf itself: how the greens roll, how fast they run, and the state of the fairways, tee boxes and bunkers. Higher is better. Nothing here is scored by the course, and no course can edit its own number.
A report answering all five is scored out of the full 100. A report that skips some is scored out of only the points it did answer, so leaving a question blank never counts against the course: skip the bunkers and the round is scored out of 85 instead of 100. Every one of the five is optional. A quick post that answers none of them is not scored at all rather than scored zero, so it cannot pull a course down.
Cart access, the golfer's star rating, pace of play and the temperature are all still asked, still stored and still shown on the course card. None of them feed the number. Between them they used to decide well over half of it, and they barely moved: cart access was a quarter of the score on its own, and on an Arizona course the answer is nearly always Ride Fairways, so a quarter of the score was the same for everyone. The result was a scale that never used its bottom half. The number now answers one question, how the course is playing underfoot, and the rest of the report answers the others.
If the greens were aerified, up to 10 points come off, shrinking in a straight line to nothing over 21 days. It is measured from the date the greens were aerified, or from the date of the report when no date was given. The day of aeration costs the full 10 points, ten days later it is worth roughly 5, and at 21 days it is gone. The finished score is held inside 0 to 100.
A single report scores one round on one day. A course score is the weighted average of its 3 most recent days of play from the last 14 days, with the newest counting most: newest day x3, second x2, third x1.
Days, not reports, and the day a round was played rather than the day it was posted. Somebody filing last month's round today does not make a course look current, and a foursome all posting the same round takes one of the three slots between them rather than all of them. When several golfers report the same day, that day is scored at their average, so nobody's report is thrown away and a day everybody agrees on carries more weight than one report on its own.
If a course has nothing played in the last 14 days, its score falls back to its most recent day on its own, however old. You still see that score on the course page, and you still see how old it is, but the course drops off Top Rated until somebody plays it and posts.
One more penalty applies at the course level. A course just overseeded carries up to 10 points off, on the same straight line to nothing over 21 days, counted from the day it finished overseeding or from the most recent report saying it was overseeded, whichever costs more.
Top Rated lists the 10 best scoring Arizona courses, and a course only qualifies if its newest round was played no more than 14 days ago. That is the same 14 days the score itself averages over, so there is one window to think about, not two: if a round is old enough to stop counting toward the score, it is old enough to stop putting the course on this list. Also excluded: anything scoring under 45, any course closed for overseed, any course inside its 21 day aeration recovery, and any course whose score comes only from people who work there.
That last one is narrow, and it is worth saying what it does not do. Course staff can file reports like anyone else and those reports count toward the score in the ordinary way, because somebody who works at a course and played it this morning knows something worth knowing. They are labelled as coming from someone who works there, everywhere they appear. What a course cannot do is reach this list on the strength of its own staff alone: if every report behind the score came from the course, the course is not ranked here until a golfer plays it and posts.
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