It's often harder for a casual spectator to evaluate ice dancing performances than free skating because ice dancers rarely make major mistakes such as falling. However, ice dancing is probably the most technical of all the skating disciplines; the steps and turns dancers perform are not only very difficult, but they also have to be executed with extreme attention to neatness and precision and timing.

Some of the criteria that the judges use are how close the man and woman skate together, whether they change positions and holds frequently, whether they skate different steps or in a face-to-face position instead of doing a lot of side-by-side shadow skating, whether they do lots of edges and turns instead of plain stroking and two-foot skating, whether the man's steps are as difficult as the woman's, how much speed they have as they move across the ice, and whether they skate in exact unison and in time with the music. In general, what the dancers are doing with their feet is much more important than their upper-body motions or facial expressions, but the judges do look at the posture of the skaters, and the extension, turnout, and toe point of the free leg.

Some spectators think that, since falls are so rare in ice dancing, they ought to be heavily penalized in the judging, but this is not the case. Actually, falls are not considered major errors in ice dancing unless it really takes the skaters a long time to get up again. In singles skating, a fall on an element like a jump can be costly because the skaters are attempting relatively few jumps in the program and that is where the difficulty is concentrated. But ice dance programs consist entirely of footwork, and a few seconds missed because of a fall amounts to a very small part of a 4-minute free dance.

Some spectators think that the rules for ice dancing are supposed to penalize theatrical-style dancing as compared to ballroom-style dancing. Again, this is not the case. During the 1980's and into the early 1990's, the emphasis in ice dancing was becoming so excessively theatrical and dancers were incorporating so many non-skating elements into their programs that dance events were becoming very hard to judge by any objective technical standards, so the ISU added more restrictions, including requiring dancers to use music suitable "for the dance floor". More recently, apparently in reaction to criticisms that the sport was becoming too boring, they have loosened up the music rules again. The current rules for the free dance allow skaters to use any music that has a definite beat. However, at the same time the restrictions against non-skating elements have been tightened up, and now dancers are required to do specific technical elements -- lifts, spins, and footwork sequences -- in their free dances.

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