In this work the study has been done on the performance pertaining to the binary antipodal AWGN channel for rate ½ coding approaches, with short and medium blocklengths. This work emphasizes on the contributions of various events leading to block error and their dependence on signal-to-noise ratio, decoder list size, CRC length, if any, and the role of list sorting. Furthermore, this work generalizes to variations, including Reed-Muller/Polar codes that follow the polarization and the method of successive decoding.