Although uncommon, some Projects use this mechanism to accept records early, rather then reject them. In the case where we have multiple accept phases and we use

CLUSTERING-METHOD=BEST

the DCE behaves in the following fashion: As it is possible for records to be accepted by multiple scoring phases, each with a different scheme and/or options and weights, the scores from the different phases can not be directly compared (when we wish to rank the records).

To overcome the problem of comparing apples to oranges, the DCE assigns a score of 100 to a record that has been accepted by an early phase. It assigns a score of 0 if the record is rejected by an early phase. Any records that are passed to the next phase are assigned the score returned by that phase.

Accept

and

Reject

limits are defined by SSA-NAME3 V2 Population Rules. The standard Populations usually define an

Accept

limit to be less than or equal to 100. If a record reaches a score that is greater than or equal to the

Accept

limit for that phase, the record is accepted and the record does not take part any further scoring phases as explained above. However, if the reason for using multiple scoring phases is only to reject early and never to accept until the final scoring phase, then the default

Accept

limit is not useful. In order to never accept records in a scoring phase, one should specify a scoring phase with the

Accept

limit of 101, which can be never reached. This can be done using the following syntax in the

CONTROLS

parameter in the Scoring phase definition:

Where AdjA is the

Accept

level adjustment and AdjR is the

Reject

level adjustment. To force the

Accept

limit to become 101 the exact value of +101 must be used as in the following example:

where the special value +101 is forcing the

Accept

level to become exactly 101. The Reject adjustment should also be specified. Omitting the

Reject

limit adjustment means that the

Reject

level is adjusted by the same amount as the

Accept

level and the value 101 would cause all records to be rejected, which is clearly not useful. By specifying the value +0 the

Reject

limit is not changed from the original value specified in the Population Rules.

See the

SSA-NAME3 POPULATIONS and CONTROLS

manual for further details.