Is poor judging an issue in UIL?

[1998-2018]

Changing a rubric is a major task and creates issues when comparing results pre and post change.   

 

Reaching agreement regarding how to change the rubric has been an insurmountable task so far.

 

Comparing pre and post change results is largely irrelevant because it only happens over beers and margaritas.

[TxDragonDad]

@Danpod just posted his "I Fix UIL" video.    Can someone explain how captions work and how that could address the concerns above?   That hadn't been suggested as a solution by anyone, so I am intrigued how this would help.    I truly do not understand and have no sarcasm intended in my question.   

[gmtb617]

Toward UIL in general...

I AGREE with:

• UIL's de-emphasis of GE. For those schools who wish to take show design and effect more seriously, BOA is more prominent in Texas than any other state (besides, debatably, Indiana). Simply, those schools should simply focus on doing as well in BOA as possible. This is the direction our school has taken in the past two years. UIL is approachable toward BOTH these schools AND those who do not wish (or have the monetary support) to put out elaborate show designs and instead would rather focus on a show demonstrating individual cleanliness and/or military marching.

• UIL's focus on music. This balances fantastically with BOA, which is why Texas bands find such great success in both, from my understanding. Flawless musical execution and cleanliness are rewarded heavily in UIL, AND adds juicy effect points for the BOA score sheets as well as higher music scores. After all, musical clarity is an effect!

I DISAGREE with:

• UIL's usage of ordinals to determine placements. This is one notable reason as to why UIL's score sheets seem to have absurd outliers: if a music judge scores 10 finalist bands 810, 780, 780, 770, 770, 760, 750, 740, 730, and 720, the placement for the band that scored 720 would be 10. That's the exact same result as a judge who scores a band 500 of a list of 10 finalist bands with scores of, say, 880, 860, 840, 820, 770, 710, 700, 680, 670, 500. Being relatively lower in relation to other bands on the score sheet of a single judge is PUNISHED by the ordinal system regardless of how closely behind the raw score is. Why not just use the raw score? I really have no clue why they decided to delegitimize the raw score markings and complicate placements by throwing in single-digit / double-digit rankings.

• No way to pad outlier judges. I understand the idea that, with split Music/Marching captions, it won't make sense to drop the lowest and highest score, but there should be some system in place to at least reduce the power of a single judge to destroy a band's ranking. The first step to address this is to use RAW SCORES. Seriously. That way, the weight of a score can be altered without tanking a band's score. I propose, regardless of Music/Marching, a band's lowest and highest ordinal  from a judge (Hypothetical example - say judges rank a band 4, 7, 8, 9, 10...the raw score of the 4 and the 10 will be targeted) will have the raw score cut in half (for example, the raw score of the 4 is 861, now it's 331 (round it up, what the heck); the raw score of the 10 is 700, now it's 350), and then sum up the raw scores of all 5 judges to determine the band's final ranking (350 + 331 + the unaltered raw scores (700 + 780 + 800) = 2961, which ranks them, say, 6th) Sometime, I'd like to analyze the effect of this system on rankings from Area/STATE contests. I think the changes would be quite interesting.

• Poor judge accountability. Here are a few standards I think will help a lot: (1) A judge for an Area should not have previously directed or have any notable affiliation with a band from that Area. (2) Each Area must schedule one judges-training session with a UIL official to standardize how judges score based off the scoresheet before Region/Area contests begin (forgive my ignorance if they do this already) (3) For the love of God, in this training session, it must be made clear that judges should NOT hold prejudice AGAINST a band for the design of their show/uniforms! The argument could be made that UIL DOES have a GE, except its worth negative points 

 

--Finally, interesting idea from Daniel Valdez about field judges. Considering it more closely, I would agree with him!

PS: If anything, the UIL system is doing something right -- Vista Ridge was named the state champion.

[TxDragonDad]

@Danpod just posted his "I Fix UIL" video.    Can someone explain how captions work and how that could address the concerns above?   That hadn't been suggested as a solution by anyone, so I am intrigued how this would help.    I truly do not understand and have no sarcasm intended in my question.   

I guess no one was able to answer this question.  I was hoping for @Danpod to clarify.   

 

I still believe that an outlier judge control is needed in UIL scoring.   Maybe the first vote to band directors should be simply:  "Do we agree what happened to RRHS at 6A State is a problem?"     Agreeing on the problem is always a prerequisite before attempting to define a solution.   

 

If that vote results in a sufficient agreement that it is a problem, then the UIL organization has been given the green light for pursuing change.   

 

The next step would be to establish several solutions and provide, details of the math, retroactive application, etc. for each solution.   Then, let there be a 5- or 10-point  rating on each solution.    The solution with the best score is pursued for implementation.   

 

The above process is much better than UIL doing all this behind the scenes work to come up with one proposal in the hopes that it will pass.   The above process saves UIL time as they shouldn't be working on something that isn't sufficiently agreed upon as a problem needing a solution.  At the same time, if there is that agreement, then change is imminent.  It is no longer if, but rather to what and when.    Lastly, by having everyone vote on the merit of each of several solutions (as opposed to sorting/ranking the options within the list, etc.) is the best way to determine a winner among all the choices.