The Summer Olympic Games mean that the graceful sport of diving is once again in the international spotlight. The individual and synchronized events on the platform and springboard showcase the aerial talents of these athletes, although it can be hard to tell how some dives are better than others. How are these dives scored?

The scoring system is slightly different for the individual and synchronized events. Individual events are scored by a panel of seven judges who recommend a score between 0 (completely failed) to 10 (excellent). The top two scores and the bottom two scores are discarded; the remaining three scores are added together and multiplied by the dive’s difficulty rating, known as the degree of difficulty. The judges consider four main criteria: the approach and starting position; the takeoff from the platform or springboard; the flight through the air; and the entry into the water. The scoring in synchronized diving is a bit more complicated, since the judges need to consider how in sync the divers’ movements are.

For synchronized events, there are 11 judges. Three judge the execution of each diver, and five judge the synchronization. Only the median execution score for each diver is considered, along with the middle three scores for the synchronization, and the sum of these five scores is multiplied by the degree of difficulty. Men, or teams of men, perform six dives each round, while women, or women’s teams, perform five dives. The round is scored by the sum of all dives—that is, each round is cumulative. It doesn’t matter if one dive blows the judges away; divers need to be consistent across all their dives in each round.

Scoring diving isn’t completely subjective. Each degree of difficulty is determined by an extremely thorough formula created by the Fédération Internationale de Natation (the International Swimming Federation, or FINA). Five components—number of somersaults, flight position, number of twists, type of approach, and unnatural entry—are given a point difficulty, added together to make the dive’s degree of difficulty.

Let’s take an example: Olympic champion Greg Louganis made famous the reverse three-and-a-half somersault tuck, which is now a standard men’s dive. FINA currently gives this dive a difficulty level of 3.5. The three and a half somersaults give this dive a baseline difficulty of 2.8, and the approach (“reverse,” which means that the diver is facing the water when he leaves the springboard but spins backward) tacks on an additional 0.3 point. Then, there’s an additional 0.4 point for “unnatural entry,” which reflects the difficulty of entering the water, since the diver’s body position prevents him from seeing the water before entry. There aren’t any twists in this dive, and the flight position (the tuck) isn’t deemed difficult enough to merit extra points. Let’s say Louganis performed the reverse three-and-a-half tuck and received the following scores from the judges: 7, 7.5, 7.5, 8.0, 8.0, 8.0, and 8.5. We lop off the two highest and the two lowest scores, which leaves us with the three scores 7.5, 8.0, and 8.0. Louganis’s score for this dive, then, would be the sum of these scores (23.5) multiplied by the difficulty (3.5), which is 82.25.