Judges

[Earl Haury]

There are two overlapping issues being discussed. Judge competency and score 
accounting at the Nats, this note is about judges and another will address 
Nats scoring.

I contend that judge competency is better than it's ever been. Primarily two 
things account for that, the NSRCA certification program and pilot-judges. 
Our cert program is designed to ensure that everyone is exposed to the 
proper judging techniques and the current rules. Using pilot-judges provides 
an indication that the judges are interested in the details of the game. As 
with anything, there are some outliers and they need to be addressed - 
especially at the Nats.

Could the system be better? You bet! Unfortunately, the cert program doesn't 
require (it's suggested) actual flight scoring and review. Nor is there any 
ranking of ability. Nor can we simply base a person's judging talent on the 
class they're flying (that works both ways in that a FAI pilot may not be a 
competent judge while an Intermediate flier may be). We really need some 
sort of ranking process.

We've migrated from one end of the judge spectrum to the other in that the 
old USPJA ranked judges by experience, but didn't quantify skills nor have a 
good training program / requirement. (Then there was the overlap into Scale, 
with associated judges - but that's another story.) If our cert program 
would have been integrated into the USPJA we might actually still have been 
able to go to a Nats to compete only. This group had many fine non-pilot 
judges, and just as now, some who had difficulty. Most of us believed that 
things would improve with certified pilot-judges, and it has. But at a the 
price of doing it ourselves while still being subject to errant scores, 
probably OK to good at local meets - but really poor at a Nats. Hmmm - "be 
careful what you wish for" seems to apply here.

Given our current system doesn't have the resources to "calibrate" or "rate" 
everyone with actual flight judging, things aren't going to change 
dramatically any time soon. We'll keep plugging away to try and educate as 
best we can and hope that information can be applied during judging 
activity.

Earl 


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