A selection panel that asks "what mark will it take to reach the final?" is implicitly assuming that question has a fairly stable answer - that recent history is a reasonable guide. That assumption holds much better for some events than others. This page measures, event by event, how much the mark it actually took to reach a final has moved around from one edition to the next, across 28 senior events (European Championships and Olympic/World Championships, both genders, sprints and hurdles up to 800m plus every jump and throw) over the last 26 years.

Events run at 1500m and beyond are deliberately excluded: those races are increasingly run tactically rather than off the clock, so "the mark it took to qualify" stops being a meaningful question in the same way.

How hard the qualifying mark is to predict depends enormously on the event. Shot (women's) swings around by roughly 5.7% of its typical level from one championships to the next - about 6.8 times as much as 110mH (men's), the steadiest event tested, which barely moves at all (around 0.8%). Recent history is a genuinely reliable guide in some events, and little better than a guess in others.

Throws are, on average, far more volatile - and so much harder to predict correctly - than sprints. Averaged across the events in each group, the throws swing by around 3.1% of their typical level between championships, the jumps by around 1.6%, and the sprints and hurdles up to 800m by only around 1.2%. Pole vault is the one jump that behaves like a throw on this measure, not like the other jumps.

Treating a volatile event's history as a reliable target can be genuinely dangerous. For a steady event, recent results really are a sound guide to what it will take to reach a final. For a volatile one, that same "look at recent history" method can amount to little more than a guess dressed up as a precise-looking number. If a selection panel then uses that guess to deselect an athlete who falls just short of a "national standard" built the same way, they are effectively ruling someone out on the strength of what is, for a volatile event, close to a random number. That is probably part of why some countries don't set a hard national standard at all, and why those that do often don't hold firm on it - waiving athletes through rather than enforcing a figure that history says could easily be wrong. See Predicting the qualifying mark (javelin) for exactly what that unreliability looks like, worked through in detail for one of the more volatile events on this page.