Performance tiers and rankings
Apart from monetary prizes, Kaggle offers many other more immaterial awards (apart from some material ones such as cups, t-shorts, hoodies and stickers). The point is that Kagglers, the participants in Kaggle competitions, do spend really a lot of time and efforts when in competition (not to count in the specialty skills they put on that in truth are quite rare in the general population). The monetary prizes usually cover the efforts of the few top ones, if not of the only top one, leaving the rest with an astonishing amount of hours just voluntary spent for no return. On the long, being in competition with no tangible result may lead to disaffection and disinterest, thus lowering the competitive intensity. Hence, Kaggle has found at least a way to reward competitors with an honor system based on medals and points. The idea is that the more medals and the more points, the more relevant are ones skills, opening for opportunities in job search or any other relevant activity based on reputation.
First, there is a general leaderboard, that combines all the leaderboards of the single competitions. In this general leaderboard (https://www.kaggle.com/rankings), one is ranked based on the position on each single competition she or he took, which awards some points that all summed together provide the ranking in the general leaderboard. At first glance, the formula for the scoring of the points in a competition may look a bit complex:
Nevertheless, in reality it is simply based on a few ingredients: the rank in a competition, your team size, the popularity of the competition and how much the competition is old.
Intuitively, ranking high in popular competitions brings many points. Less intuitively, the size of your team matters in a non-linear way. That’s due to the inverse square root part of the formula since the part of points you have to give up grows with the number of people involved but it is still quite favorable if your team is relatively small (2, max 3 people) due the advantage in wits and computational power brought about by larger collaborative teams.
Another point to keep in mind is that point decay with time. The decaying is not linear, but as a rule of thumb just think that after a year very little is left of the points you gained. Therefore, glory on the general leaderboard of Kaggle cannot last long and it is ephemeral unless you keep on participating on competitions coming up with similar results as before. As a consolation, on your profile you’ll always keep the highest rank you ever reach, as a memento of your great combined results at a certain time.
More last longing is the medal system that covers all the four aspects of competing in Kaggle. You will be prized with medals in competitions, notebooks, discussion and datasets based on your results. In competitions, medals are awarded based on your position on the leaderboard. In other areas such as discussion, notebook and datasets medals are awarded based on the upvotes of other competitors (which actually led sometimes to some suboptimal situation since upvotes are a less objective metric and also depends on popularity). The more medals you get, the higher ranks of Kaggle mastery you can enter. The ranks are classified in Novice, Contributor, Expert, Master, and Grandmaster. The page https://www.kaggle.com/ progression explains everything about how to get medals and how many and of what kind are needed to access the different ranks.
Please keep in mind that such ranks and honors are always relative and that they do change in time. A few years ago, in fact the scoring system and the ranks were quite different. Most probably in the future, the ranks will change again in order to keep the higher ones rarer and thus more valuable.
