{"id":120,"date":"2025-02-15T17:22:14","date_gmt":"2025-02-15T17:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/?p=120"},"modified":"2025-03-05T23:10:32","modified_gmt":"2025-03-05T23:10:32","slug":"schrodingers-wesmellbetter-when-we-are-both-wrong-and-right-at-the-same-time-exceptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/schrodingers-wesmellbetter-when-we-are-both-wrong-and-right-at-the-same-time-exceptions\/","title":{"rendered":"Schr\u00f6dinger&#8217;s &#8220;WeSmellBetter&#8221; &#8212; when we are both wrong and right at the same time (Exceptions)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry\">\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-144\" src=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Exceptions-300x102.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"554\" height=\"188\" srcset=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Exceptions-300x102.jpg 300w, https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Exceptions-768x261.jpg 768w, https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Exceptions.jpg 782w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 554px) 100vw, 554px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Our goal at WeSmellBetter is to <strong>accurately<\/strong> capture the <strong>publicly published results of AKC Scent Work trials<\/strong> and compile and report that information in ways that are useful and interesting to the participants.<\/p>\n<p>It is our firm belief that our database accurately reflects the data from the published results within these timeframes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We collect and process trial results every night.\u00a0 So if the AKC published a Q for your dog on Tuesday, by Wednesday, our reports should show that Q.<\/li>\n<li>We manually trigger a procedure to collect information about future trials for our Trial Finder function.\u00a0 We <em>usually<\/em> do this on Friday nights and Tuesday nights, but will admit that sometimes it just happens when we remember to do it.\u00a0 The function only gathers info on up to 1000 future trials, so it doesn&#8217;t always grab everything that is out there.\u00a0 [Sidenote:\u00a0 future trial info evolves quite regularly, usually from a rough template of &#8220;we&#8217;re going to offer absolutely everything&#8221; to the final approved version that often shows fewer classes offered, but has judges assigned.\u00a0 As long as WeSmellBetter Trial Finder shows a scheduled trial, it will have an easy link to the AKC Event, too.\u00a0 I always struggle with the AKC&#8217;s Event calendar, so usually use Trial Finder to identify the trial I want to know about and then use that link to the actual AKC Event with the premium (eventually).]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If anyone finds a situation where they think our data doesn&#8217;t accurately reflect the AKC&#8217;s published results, we want to hear from them immediately &#8211; they should use the form under the <a href=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/contact\/\">Contact Us tab at the top of the website<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There is one common case when people incorrectly *think* our data doesn&#8217;t match results.\u00a0 That&#8217;s the situation where the name of the dog in our reports doesn&#8217;t show all of the dog&#8217;s titles.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve created <a href=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/why-doesnt-my-dogs-name-include-all-their-titles-on-wesmellbetter-or-yes-i-am-a-robot\/\">a separate post to explain this<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Otherwise, we are under the impression that our data matches Results data.<\/p>\n<p><em>But if that&#8217;s true, how can there be <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">Exceptions<\/span> &#8212; <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">dogs whose name shows Scent Work titles our data doesn&#8217;t support?\u00a0 \u00a0Or dogs for whom we have calculated Scent Work titles but their name doesn&#8217;t include them<\/span><\/em> (and they have at least one Scent Work Q after that, see <a href=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/2025\/02\/15\/why-doesnt-my-dogs-name-include-all-their-titles-on-wesmellbetter-or-yes-i-am-a-robot\/\">that other post<\/a>)?<\/p>\n<p>The answer is basically that the published Scent Work results don&#8217;t tell the whole story, and, unfortunately, they are the only parts of the story that we have.<\/p>\n<p>We have a utility that we occasionally run on our data.\u00a0 It compares the titles we calculate for a dog to the titles in the dog&#8217;s name to identify the <span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Exceptions<\/span> <span style=\"color: #000000;\">described above.\u00a0 We then <\/span><\/span>investigate those to try to figure out why that might be the case.<\/p>\n<p>Currently, there are less than 100 of these dogs identified; at present, that&#8217;s about 0.3% of the dogs in the database.\u00a0 However, we can&#8217;t catch ALL discrepancies because the Exceptions Utility depends on Titles rather than Qs.\u00a0 So there are undoubtedly more dogs for which we are &#8220;off&#8221; by at least one Q, but if that hasn&#8217;t resulted in a title, our Exceptions Utility won&#8217;t flag it.<\/p>\n<p>Generally, Exceptions seem to come from one of the following:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Dogs that change registration numbers.\u00a0 Usually, this is from an All-American number to a Purebred Alternative Listing (PAL) number, where the owner has petitioned the AKC to recognize this dog as a member of a particular breed although, as an altered dog, they will not be included in the breeding registry.\u00a0 This shows up in our data as a dog who has higher-level titles without evidence of the precursor titles required, i.e. PAL 123456 Bowser SWA doesn&#8217;t have any Qs in any Novice elements and less than 3 in every Advanced element.\u00a0 As long as the dog&#8217;s name wasn&#8217;t changed, we can often piece these together and find the record for MA123456789 Bowser SWN SCA SBA SIA and merge that with the PAL dog that got some Advanced Exterior element Qs to &#8220;show the work&#8221; to support Bowser&#8217;s SWA title.<\/li>\n<li>The wrong dog registration number was recorded in the AKC&#8217;s Results.\u00a0 This happens with relative frequency and it&#8217;s amazing, given how manual the whole process is, that it doesn&#8217;t happen more.\u00a0 Our guess is that, most commonly, the Handler provides the wrong registration number at entry, often the number for one of their other dogs.\u00a0 It could be a situation where a Trial Secretary chooses the wrong dog out of the local database created by their trial management software.\u00a0 It could be a typo &#8212; transposed numbers or illegible numbers interpreted incorrectly by Trial Secretary or the AKC when they enter the results.In any case, after the fact, the Handler notifies the Trial Secretary and AKC about the error and, depending on how that communication goes, the AKC may agree to award the Q(s) and any resulting titles.In these cases, <em>sometimes<\/em>, the AKC will change the published trial results.\u00a0 Our data collection does a 60-day &#8220;lookback,&#8221; checking for any changed results, and we grab those and update our database.\u00a0 <em>It is possible that a result could be changed for a trial that was more than 60 days in the past and we would miss that update; if anyone spots that, we&#8217;d love to hear about it.\u00a0<\/em>\n<p>However, it seems that, more frequently, the AKC makes the changes directly to the dog&#8217;s record.\u00a0 This means that the published Results still show Qs awarded to the incorrect dog and Qs missing from the actual dog &#8212; and our reports show what the Results do.\u00a0 <em>So, to be clear, our data is, as was our stated goal, consistent with the AKC&#8217;s published results.\u00a0 It&#8217;s just not &#8220;right.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/li>\n<li>We have recorded Qs that would support AKC-awarded titles but, according to our logic, at least some of the Qs were Excluded.\u00a0 Exclusion Qs come from<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">a) entering a class without having the qualifications to do so, i.e. getting a Q in Master Container when you haven&#8217;t yet been awarded an Excellent Container title.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">b) the dreaded &#8220;Novice A&#8221; exception where the closing date for the trial in which the Novice A Qualifying Score occurred was AFTER the date on which the Novice element title was earned.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">c) when there are Qualifying Scores in more than two levels of the same element, only the two highest levels are counted and all others are excluded.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Honestly, I&#8217;m not sure what to tell you about these except that <em>it does appear from the data that the Exclusion rules have not necessarily been applied consistently by the AKC<\/em>.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know how manual a process this is for them or if a lot of different people are involved; I wonder how well-articulated the Novice A rule, itself, was before <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/AKCScentWork\/posts\/3771236779780073\/\">we asked the AKC exactly what the policy is<\/a>.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t know whether they may take circumstances into account and make a judgement call.\u00a0 But if the rule was being applied by impartial software, we believe that the tally would be more consistent with our own.<\/p>\n<p>In many cases, we can only speculate about what happened.\u00a0 The third case is probably the easiest to spot, because we can see the right number of Qs to support an AKC-awarded title, ours are just Excluded.\u00a0 The first case, the number change, is easy if we can search the dog&#8217;s name and find the right-fitting puzzle piece.\u00a0 The second case, wrong registration number, is really difficult and sometimes impossible to find.\u00a0 \u00a0I suspect that it accounts for most of the &#8220;I just don&#8217;t know what happened here&#8221; cases where it appears the AKC has granted a title and the AKC-published Results do not provide any data to support that award.<\/p>\n<p>What does this mean for YOU?\u00a0 Well, if you, or someone you know, believes that the WeSmellBetter reporting is wrong, we really want to hear from you, and would like to get to the bottom of the discrepancy.\u00a0 This long explanation is to help us both understand the types of things that can happen when our data, although consistent with AKC published Results, doesn&#8217;t accurately reflect your dog&#8217;s titles.\u00a0 In most of those cases, I&#8217;m going to assume you will be able to remember that there was a problem with the results reported, but that you worked with the AKC to resolve the situation.\u00a0 We&#8217;d like to know the story &#8212; <em>and are happy to keep that confidential!<\/em> &#8212; and then will see what we can do with our data in response.<\/p>\n<p>Even more so, if there are cases where you have been struggling unsuccessfully to get the AKC to make a change in your dog&#8217;s record, if there&#8217;s anything we can provide that will help you make your case, we would love to help.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/contact\/\">Contact Us!\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our goal at WeSmellBetter is to accurately capture the publicly published results of AKC Scent Work trials and compile and report that information in ways that are useful and interesting to the participants. It is our firm belief that our database accurately reflects the data from the published results within these timeframes: We collect and &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-expanded-answers-to-faqs","7":"anons"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wesmellbetter.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}