The day after the annual high school orchestra festival, our orchestra director would read the judges' grades and comments on our orchestra's performance to us. One year, one judge consistently gave our ensemble lower grades than the other two judges. After reading that judge's grades and comments, he told the class, "Of the three evaluations, this is the one I would have gone with."
Looking back, I'm not surprised. He might or might not have agreed with the harder-to-please judge's evaluation, but he was trying to motivate the orchestra to always play as well as possible. I wouldn't have expected any orchestra directors to tell their ensembles, "The judge who gave the orchestra the highest grades was obviously correct. Pay no mind to the judge whose marks were the lowest. Clearly, he was having a bad day and was being overly persnickety."
Personally, I thought the judge whose grades fell between those two extremes was most accurate. Still, you don't expect any director to motivate an ensemble by saying, in effect, "Everything in that performance was perfect. It's all downhill from here."
