HIGHER, Faster, Stronger

[BigW]

I'll start with saying you can do whatever you want with numbers, Don, but I need to grab a bite to eat before work. And believe me, everyone does to try and create the "perfect judging sheet!"

[JoeDz]

Please re-read my original post. I AM NOT promoting the tick system.

My point was that corps are scoring so high by finals night that the slightest blip can result a 99 in a caption.....in which case we are creeping back to using ticks. Mt comparison was to gymnastics where the difference between a 9.9 and a 10.0 is the dismount.

How can a judge come to a caption like Brass Composition Development and say this corps gets an 86 and that corps an 87?

With corps going on in reverse order of preliminaries, there is little room for a stand-out corps like C2 percussion or Cabs or Bucs Brass to spread the field as perhaps they should.

In evaluation judging where our designers and performers are reaching new levels of concept and execution, should we not move a 50 to the bottom of the bottom box and go from there, resulting is scores being spread out? Must we have the whole top-10 in the 90s?

Again, I recognize the flaws of the tick system and I was NOT promoting it..... I was warning that we are slipping into using a tick to delineate between two almost equal performances......

How any judge can sort through the DCI and DCA top-5s is well beyond me.......

[Jeff Ream]

well let's go there. if eric perrilou was judging and sky's snare lie is not playing in unison and has phasing with in the lineor a sanare is out of sync for a second or just misses that's a tick.if it persists for 10 beats it's another tick. now it's sky. he had ties with them so sky didn't get ticked. on comes the cabs and he shreds them for every little thing. that's the simple criteria and the simple courruption and favoritism. this was a hypothetical event but it's how it went. and look no further that 1972 DCA. the worst most corrupt judging in my career.

actually without naming corps or judges, a similar thing happened in 75, and the winner between Sky and Rebels for drums all came down to who judged that night.

Now today, it doesn't matter. You don't see that kind of crap. There's solid criteria on the sheets for the judges to use, and it's been a long time since I've truly questioned a result in DCA judging. DCI one last year, but for the most part they have it right.

[Jeff Ream]

Quickly, back to the minimum score issue. The minimum number can be whatever the circuit or organization wants it to be. Again, I have no idea what the DCA minimum score is now. A guess? Somewhere between 48-52 points. Why was this done? I can't tell you in DCA or DCI's case. In scholastic circuits, it was done partly to keep numbers in line with the traditional grading system to make it easier for the students to know how good or not they were. ("We scored an 88, kids. That's like a solid 'B' for tonight's effort.....")

I can guess, but again, I don't know. For things like this, I wish I could have talked to people like Mickey and Dick Pronti when I had the chances to about it. And yeah, I miss both of them as well.

My guess is that they wanted to get rid of those numbers below 50 for a couple of reasons.

1: Let's face it. People still talk about some of those really low scores, swallow, and cringe about them 30 or more years later. ("Oh, man. Fran, you remember the Barely Normal VFW Lion Cadets from Fritters, Alabama at that show in Belchville when they got the 22? Jeez, that was really, really horrible.... Yeah it was, especially when the soloist swallowed his mouthpiece and he sounded better playing through the leadpipe...") You're trying to sell DCA or DCI as a really great product, expand the brand, people see scores like that, and it doesn't look good. Those who know the way the game was played understand it, those who do not don't.

2: We can get into a legitimate battle and debate about the concerns people have for self-esteem nowadays, and I truthfully don't want to here. But this kind of stuff could really undermine a program. "We scored a 13.6! We (STINK!)" How do you recruit and build? How do you retain people? Yes, Westshore did after that 37 point show. It could be done. Larry Hershman and Chuck Saia deserve a lot of credit for making success happen from that. But think of how many corps didn't dig out of the hole and now we sit over a beer and reminisce and wish they were still involved in DCA. There aren't enough corps around anymore for anyone to shrug and not care when someone fails because there are still hundreds more out there. If getting a 62 looks better instead of a 22, as long as the corps are ranked properly, and the staff of the corps and its members understand they have a lot of work to do from that 62 point score, I'm fine with it myself.

3: This is an issue that's been around for decades, actually. IIRC, around the 1977-79 period, the perfect score in DCA contests was 105 points. I was told BITD DCA wanted to get numbers higher even then to generate interest and excitement. I'm pretty sure on this, folks. I believe the Allentown PBS broadcast even broke down the numbers onscreen at one point and showed a 105 point total. Then the perfect score was set back at 100, and numbers dropped back into the 88-90 point range for top corps for awhile.

This leads back to Joe's original post. I need to take care of stuff before work. I felt I had to set up a lot of things that happened in the past to really explain some of the scoring mechanics in play, and I'll hit on that next.

#2 for sure.

add to #2 #2B please....keep people wanting to come to shows if people are getting a 25

[Jeff Ream]

Please re-read my original post. I AM NOT promoting the tick system.

My point was that corps are scoring so high by finals night that the slightest blip can result a 99 in a caption.....in which case we are creeping back to using ticks. Mt comparison was to gymnastics where the difference between a 9.9 and a 10.0 is the dismount.

How can a judge come to a caption like Brass Composition Development and say this corps gets an 86 and that corps an 87?

With corps going on in reverse order of preliminaries, there is little room for a stand-out corps like C2 percussion or Cabs or Bucs Brass to spread the field as perhaps they should.

In evaluation judging where our designers and performers are reaching new levels of concept and execution, should we not move a 50 to the bottom of the bottom box and go from there, resulting is scores being spread out? Must we have the whole top-10 in the 90s?

Again, I recognize the flaws of the tick system and I was NOT promoting it..... I was warning that we are slipping into using a tick to delineate between two almost equal performances......

How any judge can sort through the DCI and DCA top-5s is well beyond me.......

the judge can determine who gets what because each sheet has a set criteria that is being looked for. then groups of numbers are placed into boxes....lets just say 90-100 is box 5 for both sub boxes. obviously a 99 means a corps is always applying the criteria on the sheet. an 87 says they are often getting the criteria. now that 86 means they are often getting it, but maybe not quite as often as the 87 is.

if people are getting 90's, then that means people are meeting the criteria on the sheet up and down the line. The beauty of it is that rarely do you see everyone place the same on each sheet...someones brass is better than drums, someone is better upstairs than downstairs...and then the laptop comes in and Vicki or Glen or whoever tallies it up.

I dont have the current DCA sheets or even know if they're available, but ask around to see if you can get them. My hunch is if you saw them, read the descriptors in the boxes as well as the wording on the sheet, you'll gain some understanding

[BigW]

Ah-hah! I didn't think you were trying to promote ticks, Joe. Not at all. I wasn't sure where the question was going and the only way I thought I could answer it was backtrack and piece together what led to the current situation.

Jeff nails it on how you can split someone by a tenth. The top number is how challenging the content is, or how effective. The bottom number's how the performer performs the content. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions. Usually it's more than just one bad note. It could be that the one group performs in some more positive ways then the other with the way the sheets are now. Maybe you hear just a few more subtle touches that are really right and exact. Maybe a group is more consistent, or only stumbling in the really difficult situations, not in easier ones.

How do you do it? As Jeff says, the verbage on the sheets (nowadays called placemats sometimes) guide the judge. Something else I think of at this point is that as a Judge, it really pushes you to really examine music of all styles, composers, etc. It's why I was listening to Ornette Coleman on WGBO on the way to Wayne. Sometimes, I catch the Saturday PM Opera and study it as I drive. Heck, while I was writing the review for Wayne, I was listening to Perez Prado. Been listening to a new on the scene cellist in the car lately. It helps with figuring out which apples and oranges are the good ones if you take a close look at as much good musical fruit as you can of different kinds and learn to appreciate it for what it is and figure it out.

The Mid 90's DCI sheets were very, very exact and detailed in this way. Boxes were even split up, like Box, 3A, 3B, 3C, even the top box was 5 and 5A. The differences were maybe two words in one sentence were just slightly shaded one way or another. If you read them carefully and used them as the tools they were meant to be, you could easily get within 1 to 3 tenths of your final number.

If anyone has questions about the whole "box" thing, I'd be glad to explain, and I was going to until Joe clarified. I guess the teacher in me wants to explain and educate.

I really have a genuine worry that some people think Judging is some kind of top-secret wizardry, and part of it is I've felt no one's really ever taken the time sat down and explained it very well with the exception of when DCI released its new placemats online a season or 2 ago with some comments and a video interview with Mike Cesario. Ask, and I'll do my very best to be of assistance.

Just one more thing for Joe. You can make a box as big or as small as you want. You could have sub-boxes like DCI did. I do *think* based on the numbers I've seen in DCA the past couple of seasons the lowest possible score's already somewhere in the 48-52 range already.

I do know the current way they have the judge's sheets set up and the scoring weights, it's better than it was 20 years ago by far in terms of having bigger boxes to create spreads, especially in some of the captions. It's not like it used to be in Field Brass where the perfect score was 40/40, not 100/100 and the top box was from 37-40 and you had to stuff everyone into 4 tenths on the top, and 4 tenths on the bottom.

Should we have 7 corps breaking 90 like we did last year and maybe this year? A fair and good question. If those corps meet whatever criteria are on those sheets to earn a 90, yeah, absolutely.

Are there enough tenths in the boxes the corps are entering at the end of the season for the judges to get everyone properly ranked? Not knowing what the sheets look like, it **seems** to be okay. Why do I think so? I'm not seeing many if any bottom line ties in individual captions at prelims. That seems to show me the judges have enough room to wiggle around the boxes and numbers with a lot of corps to judge.

If it isn't, they can sit down and easily fix it.

As for making sure that certain corps farther back that could have really strong performances in certain captions, You have to get them high enough to get people under them and not end up cramming everyone underneath too tight.... yet leave enough room above them so if later corps are better, you have room to place them fairly. This may be part of the answer as to why you see the 98+ numbers used.

Thanks for making me think hard about this topic, Joe. It makes my really boring job a lot easier to bear.

.

[Dan Detweiler]

For what it's worth, granted that's not much, but I have been judging at various levels for 30 years and for me the best description and guidance I have ever seen in the judging world regarding how to judge, what each caption should evaluate, etc. has been the WGI Percussion Manual. Very enlightening stuff, especially in regard to Effect. Definitely required reading as far as I'm concerned for anyone wishing to enter into the judging community.

Dan

[BigW]

IIRC, Dan, the whole "Triad of Effect" concept was developed by the WGI people. Come to think of it, it seems a lot of the best ideas over the past 10-20 years in terms of how to judge and making the system better have come from them.

[jkmummer]

Joe,

I have to be honest and agree with Jeff that your posts are confusing. On the one hand your saying scores are to high, on the other you want to set a base of 50 which would suggest that the top scores would in fact be high. Unless you're assuming that a judge would use the bottom box of 50 to whatever the top of that box should be in a championship setting.

I'll also agree with Big W that it's not wizardry. You evaluate a performance. As you do this you're narrowing down a frame of what and how a group is achieving and determining what box criteria and descriptors the group is achieving. Essentially getting yourself into a range of about 15 points depending on what is defined for that particular box. Then narrow down further where in the box, low, middle, high. Then who do I have that may be in the same general number area. Was this group better or worse, and by how much which is defined on the back of the sheets by looking at the value of a tenth. Jeff and John have explained and Dan is right that the WGI book does explain this well. Once your at this point, it's really up to that judges experiences and professional call.

Currently DCA and many circuits are using the EASS system which allows the judge to evaluate a group of teams and then be able to adjust and tweak numbers accordingly before finalizing their numbers and turning them in. What this has done is eliminate the phrase "I would've had you higher/lower but you were on too early or late" Because of this change I personally believe the numbers are probably more accurate or reflective of what a judge feels than ever before.

[Kamarag]

Taking only the complaint that, "scores are too high"...relative to what? Scored last week? Scores last year? Honestly, who cares? We use a box-based build-up system where numbers are assigned by achieving certain criteria. That's the reason there's no such thing as a "perfect score". Scoring a 20 out of 20 only means you maxed out the criteria relative to where your competition was.

The numbers only matter for the sake of raking the corps in each caption. That's it.