Judges

[BUDDYonRC at aol.com]

In a message dated 8/1/2005 1:22:28 PM Central Daylight Time,  
pattern4u at comcast.net writes:

Buddy,          
            "You called  me a trouble maker at the Nat's"  - Did I do that??? 
Certainly not  meant in any nasty way, I assure you.
 
I actually want people to stir things up. If you let  a pot of stew just sit 
there the bottom burns and the top never gets  cooked.
 
I have held about every opinion expressed in this  thread. I have changed my 
mind many times as my education continued in  the judging arena. 
 
I have not typed a lot of responses because a  box-cutter and I had an 
exchange where the box cutter won ;-(
 
A few years ago we sent a bunch of heavyweight judges  to site-4.  (Earl 
Haury is heavier than I am - and he's in Texas so he  can't visit me tonight 
either). Boy! did we upset some pilots with accurate  judging. Not sure they wanted 
us back. Same thing in FAI or  Masters.
 
I used Earl's name because his raw scores and mine  have tracked pretty 
closely. I score a bit higher than  him these days because I am one CIAM memo ahead 
of him - just teasing  Earl :-)
 
The Nats this year had the same standard of  pilot judges that it gets every 
year. All certified. As you said that needs  some improvement - I totally 
agree. Dave said that if he had 10 full time  experienced judges he could improve 
things a lot. All I have to do is find  them... any thoughts on that one. 
Would two really good judges be better than  three not so good and who decides who 
they are?
 
I think that I can say that about half of the pilots  did two session or 
more, some even did three. All scores were included in all  classes in all AMA 
rounds. The AMA rules book is totally silent on scoring  standards. Anyone want 
to get into that one?
 
We will be putting a whole bunch of info on eth  scoring system, the matrix, 
the finals calculations  etc in the next  K-Factor. I figure that the more we 
publish the more we will get  understanding and increase the chances of coming 
up with a better mouse  trap.
 
We also want to leave a bunch of better and more  accurate documentation for 
those who succeed us.
 
Regards,

Eric.
 
 
 



Eric
Another note that may shed some light on the subject. Most judges I think  
make an effort to score maneuvers correctly but what I have noticed is that the  
new and less experienced ones seem to miss the geometry requirements of 
certain  maneuvers, this can make a huge difference in scores they judge defects 
but  overlook basics, such as hight and width which should match, entry and exit 
 altitude requirements and so fourth. They seem to focus on the fine points 
but  don't see the forest for the trees. This can only be overcome when they  
have studied and understand the requirements of each manuever. We teach how  
the downgrades should be applied but may be failing to stress the  importance to 
them of the need to be aware of the geometry requirements.  For example I 
made a point to look at some tear sheets where obvious major  errors in geometry 
were flown very smoothly my score in one case would have  been a six at best, 
guess what, would you believe a nine and one half from two  judges and a five 
from the other. likewise on the other hand I compared   one where the maneuver 
was performed correctly but with a couple of small errors  flown at a faster 
speed my score would have been eight the tear sheet scores  were two, sixes 
and an eight and a half. I may not be the best judge around but  I believe that 
only one of the scores in each case was correct and these  were both four 
k-factor maneuvers so the pilot in each case if I am correct  received about a 
twenty point bonus on his normalized score but worse yet  everyone else was 
penalized if he won the round. Think about it.one or two  rounds where this happens 
and some pilots best effort becomes his throw  away.
Buddy       
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.f3a.us/pipermail/nsrca-discussion/attachments/20050801/df5f8594/attachment.html