And here we have an explanation of our Ramen Marathon scoring system, along with our printable scoresheet.

Each restaurant was scored based on the following criteria, on a scale of 1-5:

CRITERIA

• Noodle
• Broth
• Meat
• Egg
• Other Toppings
• Overall Score

SCALE

• 1 = I hate it
• 2 = I don’t like it
• 3 = I am neutral
• 4 = I like it
• 5 = I love it

We also noted the following, but didn’t score them:

• Price
• Service
• Ambience
• Other Food
• Would you come here again? Why or why not?

We started off the Marathon with a pre-weighted scoring system (where noodles and broth scores were worth double), but quickly realized that each individual judge differs in the criteria they feel are important. For example, the ramen egg is deeply important to our friend Michael and to me, as we have long cherished a love of nitamago. But if you (are a weirdo and) don’t like eggs at all, that criterion isn’t going to be important to you. Therefore, the overall score we each assign is the only one that really counts, but you can see what criteria contributed most to the score for each judge by looking at the points they gave for the Noodle, Broth, Meat, Egg, and Other Toppings categories.

Our friends and fellow Ramen Marathon eaters, Jayzee (of Jayzee Eats Stuff), Sarah P, and Sarah H, have backgrounds in statistics and data analysis, and we owe them for debating and deciding on the best scoring system for us. I eavesdropped on a bit of their discussion, and it was utterly incomprehensible for a layperson. A statistical analysis of our results is forthcoming by guest writer Jayzee!

Our printable score sheet is available here. Please feel free to use it on your own ramen quests if you like!