The flight simulator uses the following weights to establish a default set of priorities:

	1st Goal: Increase the Idagon Economic Product	3
	2nd Goal: Preserve Land Use in Agriculture	2
	3rd Goal: High Flow to Help Salmon Smolts	2
	4th Goal: Maintain Flow Below Canyon Lake	1
	5th Goal: Maintain Flow at Big Springs	1
	6th Goal: Maintain Flow Below American Lake	1

You should encourage the students to enter their own weights rather than proceeding with the default weights. If they are unsure about setting the weights, you might advise them to pick the goals that are least important to them. These would be assigned the minimum weight of 1. (A weight of zero does not respect the fundamental premise that each of the goals has some merit.) They should then move to the more important goals and assign a higher weight that reflects the relative importance. The default weight of 2 for salmon smolts, for example, means that meeting this goal is twice as important as meeting the 4th, 5th or 6th goals. The students may continue this procedure until each goal has been assigned a weight. (The weights do not have to be integer values.) When they are satisfied with the relative values, they should check that the weights add to 10. If they do not sum to 10, they should adjust the more important goals up or down as needed.

This advice may be viewed as an extremely abbreviated version of SMART, the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique explained by Gardiner and Edwards (1975). The "score keeper" has been designed to speed the student's entry into the simulations. If some students feel that abbreviated nature of the score keeper does a disservice to their values, you might assure them that dynamic models may be combined with more sophisticated evaluation models, as explained by Gardiner and Ford (1980).
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One final bit of advice -- some students will feel that the group is required to agree on a set of weights. Remind them that each team may view the river differently, and they are free to assign different weights. The purpose exercise is not to force a consensus on priorities for the river; it's to encourage students to put their differences aside and search for "win-win" policies for the river.