DCA Championships - How to Fix the Competition Problem

[Jeff Ream]

Having judged at many levels for over 30 years, it bothers me that people seem to feel like all judges are corrupt and incompetent. As a whole, judges are highly trained, educated, honest people that are making a call based on their own history and a set of criterion spelled out on the back of the sheets. Whenever you are placed in a position of ranking groups somebody is going to be upset by your opinions. Are there those that are better than others? Of course. Are there some that maybe shouldn't be put in the position they are in? Possibly. But on the whole, they get it right more often than not. We may not like the outcome, but when taken as a whole, they do a pretty amazing job. Having listened to all of our tapes from finals, I was very impressed with most of the commentary. Did I agree with all of their rankings? No. But when all is said and done, I am not prepared to throw them all over a cliff and say the system is flawed and needs to be abandoned. I am a firm believer that if you are putting a good product out there on a consistent basis, people are going to take notice. After all, that is all the performers can do anyway, and that is where I choose to place my efforts.

As always, just my 2 cents.

Dan

flag on the play. illegal use of logic and truth.

[onthe50]

My corps won communication most of the year, and not even we had any idea what it rewards or how it's numbers are allocated.

It's the mystery number.......... How different judges reward communication gets interesting too.

[N.E. Brigand]

Which judge(s) decides(s) the showmanship award?

And which pick(s) the best drum major?

[Schnitzel]

It's the mystery number.......... How different judges reward communication gets interesting too.

The Communication and Entertainment Award comes from a specific subcaption on both the Music and Visual Effect sheets. The two scores are added, and then divided by some coefficient to contribute to the total score. Numerically, it's the equivalent of two different performance subcaptions - obviously an effort to reward the performers on the show-of-the-evening, and encourage more audience engagement on the part of designers. Of course, this assessment is subjective, and therefore somewhat numerically volatile. Communication and Entertainment aren't objective concepts.

Speaking of the subjective/objective discussion, at no time in the history of DCI has judging been completely objective. Not possible. The tick system was never completely objective, because of inconsistency in "error tolerance" among judges (and all other humans). Simply deciding where the error point is in all of the close-to-infinite number of behaviors sampled in a drum corps show is an entire study in itself. For example, what is "in tune" on a brass instrument? Accuracy within a quarter tone? 15 cents?

The "good old days" weren't.

[GUARDLING]

The Communication and Entertainment Award comes from a specific subcaption on both the Music and Visual Effect sheets. The two scores are added, and then divided by some coefficient to contribute to the total score. Numerically, it's the equivalent of two different performance subcaptions - obviously an effort to reward the performers on the show-of-the-evening, and encourage more audience engagement on the part of designers. Of course, this assessment is subjective, and therefore somewhat numerically volatile. Communication and Entertainment aren't objective concepts.

Speaking of the subjective/objective discussion, at no time in the history of DCI has judging been completely objective. Not possible. The tick system was never completely objective, because of inconsistency in "error tolerance" among judges (and all other humans). Simply deciding where the error point is in all of the close-to-infinite number of behaviors sampled in a drum corps show is an entire study in itself. For example, what is "in tune" on a brass instrument? Accuracy within a quarter tone? 15 cents?

The "good old days" weren't.

[Jeff Ream]

The Communication and Entertainment Award comes from a specific subcaption on both the Music and Visual Effect sheets. The two scores are added, and then divided by some coefficient to contribute to the total score. Numerically, it's the equivalent of two different performance subcaptions - obviously an effort to reward the performers on the show-of-the-evening, and encourage more audience engagement on the part of designers. Of course, this assessment is subjective, and therefore somewhat numerically volatile. Communication and Entertainment aren't objective concepts.

Speaking of the subjective/objective discussion, at no time in the history of DCI has judging been completely objective. Not possible. The tick system was never completely objective, because of inconsistency in "error tolerance" among judges (and all other humans). Simply deciding where the error point is in all of the close-to-infinite number of behaviors sampled in a drum corps show is an entire study in itself. For example, what is "in tune" on a brass instrument? Accuracy within a quarter tone? 15 cents?

The "good old days" weren't.

amen on tics.

and thank you for that description, because last year, sitting in front a judge working that sheet, and knowing what GE sheets are, I was totally baffled how they arrived that that number as well as their GE number.

[VOReason]

The problem is that when all the DCA shows come off the drawing board, they are ALREADY behind the Bucs.

[LucyGuy66]

VO, I wouldn't say that to loud. If that were truly the case, DCA would be in REAL trouble.

[Jeff Ream]

VO, I wouldn't say that to loud. If that were truly the case, DCA would be in REAL trouble.

well, I wouldn't be surprised if Bucs have already started mapping out next year's show. and have been

[Dan Detweiler]

So have we, as I'm sure most of our competitors have. It's a year round activity. We have our first major fundraiser in a couple of weeks. Design meetings, recruitment strategies...all in the woks.