Maybe. I'd hazard a guess that membership of the top 1000 places in a high-stakes national exam might actually be less noisy than a gold medal. That is, on a re

Maybe. I'd hazard a guess that membership of the top 1000 places in a high-stakes national exam might actually be less noisy than a gold medal. That is, on a re-run, what percentage of people keep their top-1000 scores, and (on re-runs of the last 40 years olympics, times 100 individual events, say) what percentage of gold medalists would have kept theirs? But I have not checked the numbers. Obviously if you restrict attention to those with exam scores near the boundary, you can get different results. And there are indeed other sports scores more precise than the one I mentioned.