What are the National Cyber League (NCL) Power Rankings? This is a question that I have racked my brain on since they came out. Let’s take a look at exactly what they are and how the heck they get those rankings. We will also look at how you can improve your school’s placement on those boards and how to filter by region—I’ve done this a few times mostly because I was curious to see how we performed in just our area.

What are the NCL Power Rankings?

So, what are they? The National Cyber League (NCL) Power Rankings is a scoring system. It represents the abilities of students, grouped by school, in such areas as identifying hackers from forensic data, pen-testing and auditing vulnerable websites, recovering from ransomware attacks, and more. The scores are updated every season to reflect performance for that season, and you can do some filtering to check out how you have increased or decreased in those rankings.

How are the rankings calculated?

That’s great, Hush1e, but how did they get the scores? Glad you asked! Let’s break down the scoring now. The 3 things that determine how schools are ranked are: a school’s top-performing individual, their top-performing team, and how many students from that school participated.

Another thing, because we’ve not had to say this enough apparently, is that if you get disqualified because you weren’t behaving ethically and following the rules, or you decided not to participate in the Preseason and Individual Games, your part in the scoring doesn’t count.

Great! We did all of that as a team. Why didn’t it count? Another thing that matters in the Power Rankings scores is that a school cannot have more than one team member that is not from that school. If your team has three or fewer players, they all must be from your school as well.

Hopefully this post demystified the NCL Power Rankings for you, or at least guided you to the information to check out yourself! This is the first blog we as Ambassadors have given you on Power Rankings; I’m sure there will be more to come, so stay tuned.

See you in the Game and forever stalking Slack ~ Hush1e