Everything you do in training needs to have clearly defined criteria for success. This doesn’t mean that every drill is a pass/fail go/no go exercise. Those who’ve trained with me know that a sizable percentage of my training time is spent on what I call experimentation drills, where the objective is technical experimentation leading to more efficient technique. But for isolation and combination skill work, we have to clearly define our desired end state before practicing.

There are a myriad of scoring mechanisms used for tactical and competitive shooting, and most of them fall far short of the realities of a gunfight. Especially the typical crutch of institutional training. What usually happens in law enforcement and military range sessions is a large number of students on a flat range line, shooting a drill with a generous par time that isn’t even remotely challenging by true performance shooting standards. What this creates is a lowest common denominator training environment where meeting a minimum standard is enough, and individual students don’t even have a mechanism for gauging progress beyond simply passing or failing.

I understand why par time training can be logistically necessary for large training courses, especially for people entering into a career field or specialized assignment. But the reality is that this will never create high levels of performance shooting skill. So how should we score our drills in our ongoing training? How do we set appropriate criteria for success?

There are two main variables at play when scoring a performance shooting drill, hits on target and elapsed time. Neither is more or less important than the other in a gunfight. Indeed, understanding the balancing act between speed and accuracy and put it into practice is one of the most important attributes needed for the development of a high level of shooting skill.

I judge hits on target in three categories, regardless of whether we are talking about a drill, a competition, or a gunfight. Hits on target are either optimal, acceptable, or unacceptable. On a USPSA target in competition, this translates easily into A, C, and D scoring zones. For the real world, optimal is about a fist sized group in the high center chest or about an index card sized group in the head, acceptable is about the width of the USPSA C zone and from the hips to the shoulder blades, and unacceptable is anything else.

Elapsed time is so much more than just a par time. If shooter A can place the same number of optimal hits on target as shooter B in 75% of shooter B’s time, then shooter A is out performing shooter B by 25%. This matters. In competition, but it matters even more when an opponent is attempting to put rounds on you as well.

Many scoring systems have been created in an attempt to measure the balance of speed and accuracy needed for performance. Par times with penalties for sub-optimal hits and time-plus scoring with varying degrees of penalties, some emphasizing accuracy more than speed and others the opposite. In my opinion, the best of these scoring systems is minor power hit factor scoring as seen in USPSA. If you reduce the size of the A zone by about half, this has the balance of speed and accuracy needed to train for fighting with a firearm.

The way hit factor scoring works is that it’s points divided by time. Or to sum it up, points per second. A zone / optimal hits have a value of five points. B/C zone / acceptable hits have a value of three points. D zone / unacceptable hits (but not misses) have a value of one point. Misses give you a penalty of ten points. The math is cumbersome at first but soon makes sense when you spend some time scoring drills this way.

As an example, let’s take an “El Presidente”drill. Draw and fire two rounds each on three targets, reload, then two more rounds on each target. Twelve rounds fired is a maximum of sixty points. If I shoot all As in six seconds, I have a hit factor of ten. If I shoot ten As and two Cs in 5 seconds, I have a hit factor of 11.2. Points per second.

The downfalls of hit factor scoring are that it is less user friendly than simpler systems, and less suited to a group or institutional training environment. But in your own training, if you aren’t using hit factor scoring, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Learn to do he math, internalize it, and your training will become more realistic and efficient. And you’ll be a better shooter.