The 6.0 system of judging figure skating was developed during the early days of the sport, when early international competitions consisted of only compulsory figures. Skaters performed each figure three times on each foot, for a total of six, which as writer Ellyn Kestnbaum states, "gave rise to the system of awarding marks based on a standard of 6.0 as perfection".[1] It was used in competitive figure skating until 2004, when it was replaced by the ISU Judging System in international competitions, as a result of the 2002 Winter Olympics figure skating scandal. British ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean earned the most overall 6.0s in ice dance, Midori Ito from Japan has the most 6.0s in single skating, and Irina Rodnina from Russia, with two different partners, has the most 6.0s in pair skating.
The 6.0 system was a placement judging system. Judges awarded two marks in both the short program and free skate: one for technical merit and one for presentation, and each mark expressed as a number on a scale from 0 to 6.0. They were assessed in required elements for technical merit in the short program and could perform whatever elements they chose during the free skate, which represented the difficulty of a "well-balanced program".[2] The presentation mark did not include what reporter Sandra Loosemore called "artistry".[3] It also did not include the judges' opinions or a measure of how much they liked a skater's performance, music, costume, or hairstyle. Criticism of the 6.0 system included that it did not provide statistics and points of comparison between skaters' performances and lent itself to judging discrepancies, inconsistencies, and dishonesty. Skating order during competitions, due to the ranking nature of the system, also impacted marks.