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Desired Changes to Adjudication Sheets (The Annual Thread)


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So let's just get this thread over with before the season really kicks into gear. It can be for BOA or UIL. Get it out of your system now.

I was just over at the MFA site and was reviewing the BOA adjudication sheets to see if anything has changed. Didn't notice anything.

The sheets were already pretty general, but I feel like over time they've gotten more and more vague -- probably to give adjudicators some latitude. I have mixed feelings about that, especially as the competition gets fiercer every year. For example, the Music Individual performance sheet used to be more specific for all 3 choirs. Now it's just tone quality for one half of the score and accuracy for the other half. Meanwhile, the Performance halves of the General Effect scores have always been vague. I've long wished that the effect of cleanliness were more explicitly mentioned, just so that I can stop having to correct people who think that GE is all about design. You can't get a high GE score without a great performance.

Percussion seems to be a complete afterthought in the sheets -- same as auxiliary groups, like guard, for whom the only mention is a vague one of "equipment." (Actually, can guards even be called auxiliary anymore, given the enormous contribution they make to many bands' shows? Is that Broken Arrow guard really a "support group"? It's like the size of the band!) We probably need to go back to the old way, where these two groups are separated out and judged by qualified professionals, because they need more attention. I'll be honest: I don't really trust wind specialists judging percussion and vice versa. Too many bad experiences listening to those tapes! Meanwhile, whether or not guard is mentioned in any substantial way largely comes down to whether the visual judge is trained in it. Frankly, you shouldn't be judging visual performance if you don't know the basic facts regarding the adjudication of movement and equipment skills. Everyone knows how to judge issues regarding spacing, alignment, timing issues, drill that clicks and is readable vs. drill that amoebas its way from one form to the next, projection of style, etc. Persistent issues with an auxiliary group are just as distracting.

I like the inclusion of difficulty and challenges, but again, we need to be a bit more specific. What is considered dirty for a blind drill move, for example, as it's listed as "highly difficult" on the sheets? I'm not asking for some Olympic-style point docking system, just some clarification. For this reason, performance captions have sometimes become difficult to predict, because sometimes shows that are much dirtier than others (not just a little bit dirtier) end up getting significantly higher scores than cleaner shows.

I'd love for BOA to go the WGI route and develop a "Box 6" for their sheets, which is reserved for groups that set new standards. These are the 98+ scoring groups. I agree that scores that high should be reserved for those groups really pushing the envelope in terms of artistry and demand. Having a "Box 6" provides a stronger incentive to try new things.

Not really sheet-related, but I'd also love BOA to double the judging panels at major events like Nationals and the San Antonio Super Regional. Everything is so competitive that I feel like some safeguards are needed so that a group doesn't get screwed over by a single judge.

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100% agree with these. i do like the inclusion of difficulty though. i feel like we've seen a pretty significant shift away from the really demanding marching + playing at the same time we saw back when i was in school. sure, our shows were filthy back then, but we MOVED! it's hard to watch LD Bell's 2002 show for example and not think we've regressed a little in that department. i appreciate the variety of movement in the newer shows though.

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I'm harping on the guard aspect a bit, but I think the knowledge from that is transferable to the rest of the band, especially as choreography becomes more involved with each year. I remember watching that 2014 Broken Arrow show and being pretty stunned by the band members performing lifts -- literally picking each other up and spinning them around. Talk about difficult! If as a judge you can say something like, "Hey, as that side 2 block of woodwinds performs a chassé into their next drill set, they're not maintaining vertical alignment," I think that's very useful, because it's specific.

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On 9/24/2021 at 12:27 PM, Rubisco said:

Talk about difficult! If as a judge you can say something like, "Hey, as that side 2 block of woodwinds performs a chassé into their next drill set, they're not maintaining vertical alignment," I think that's very useful, because it's specific.

Dang I love this. Yes @Rubisco I think I may be your #1 fan!  ?

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/9/2021 at 9:54 AM, 11BandMan11 said:

PREACH! 

One of my biggest gripes with the new UIL sheets, are the 'individual' woodwind, brass, percussion, etc.

For example - HOW is a judge supposed to accurately judge individual performance and musicianship of woodwinds from the box?! 

Thoughts?  

I agree that if you're going to judge the individual choirs, you probably need to be down on the field, especially for the woodwinds.

I think my ideal system for judging band right now is similar to the one used by DCI. I would have 3 music performance judges, 3 visual performance judges, and 4 effect judges -- at least for major events. Two music judges would be on the field: one for percussion (sheet divided into front ensemble and drumline) and one for winds (sheet divided into brass and woodwinds). The third music judge would be ensemble music up in the stands. One visual performance judge on the field level (who is qualified to evaluate both marching and more elaborate types of movement/choreography), one color guard/auxiliary judge up in the stands (sheet divided into skills/vocabulary and achievement), and one ensemble visual judge in the stands. Two music effect judges and two visual effect judges (let's give the VGE judges a little bit more accountability).

So, 30% music performance, 30% visual performance, and 40% effect. One of the main reasons BOA went with 60% effect was to reduce the emphasis on "fine-line" performance perfection, but I feel like since they've added content-related subcaptions to the performance captions, there's less of a need to adjust for that. BOA can reduce the influence of effect in the scores a little bit and still have it not be all about boring, perfect cleanliness.

The color guard/auxiliary caption could be a bit difficult to implement when comparing dance teams to color guards, but I do think the critics of dance teams are correct to point out that color guards dance AND use two or three different pieces of equipment, which I think should be rewarded in a vocabulary section. Using equipment also makes your ensemble visual more exposed. So, the dance teams would generally get lower scores in vocabulary, but can make it up if they execute what they do at a high level and do movement that is more difficult than what we see from the guards.

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Now that we've gone through another round of UIL State competitions, especially with a new scoring system, I think I would like to weigh in on this. I've seen a lot of people sort of griping about the addition of percussion scores to the sheets, which I guess I understand, but I think their issue with the scores resides in a different issues with UIL judging and not the inclusion of percussion scores themselves. I have long wanted percussion and guard to at least be a little more included into the scoring systems, since in the previous state competitions, they each only very slightly affected scores in just a few categories, despite being equally as important as the rest of the band. So, for me, giving percussion their own subclass helps a lot in resolving some of these issues. It's hard to know the exact effect and weight percussion was given in the previous system, but at least at this point, they have a defined weight in scoring.

That brings me to my new issue, the exclusion of color guard/dance teams. If you're going to give percussion their own category, that leads me to believe your intent was to gain a more inclusive, all-encompassing score, yet you just completely left out the entire guard. This, I think I'm arguing, means that the color guard is valued even less than they were originally. I really like the way DCI scoring is set up, considering it is very fair in its inclusivity of all portions of a marching band but also awards things with fair, defined weight, something I personally believe is being left out of both BOA and UIL. 

Now, this is probably the most common complaint among people about the UIL scoring system, but it mathematically just makes absolutely no sense at all. At least in the BOA scoring, the gaps between different groups can be uneven, meaning 1-3 can be really close, and then there can be a big gap between 3 and 4, then 4-7 are super close, etc. I feel like this is the most intuitive way of judging, where instead of just ranking them, you are actually critiquing their performance and then the rankings are weighed properly with how much better one band is than the other. With UILs scoring, the gap that is between 3 and 4 doesn't matter at all. This gives a huge advantage to band 4 who in a BOA system is pretty far out of medaling for that category, and disadvantageous for 1-3 (especially silver and bronze) since their lead over the other bands is basically completely ignored. However, this can go in the completely opposite direction, too, almost never really finding a perfect center. The best example I think of this came from the percussion scoring this year. Normally, if you score a band 980 in 1st and the 11th place band is at a 940, you're pretty much saying that the band in first is just slightly better than groups 2-11, quite literally about a 4% range of scores. With UIL's scoring, you're quite literally scoring the band in 11th as if they're 11 times worse than the band in first. This is exactly what happened to Marcus and Flower Mound this year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the actual rankings themselves, I have my own opinions but this isn't the place for those. My focus is just on how dramatic that shift in placement is for these two bands. Outside of the percussion scores, Flower Mound was leading Marcus by 5 points. That's a decent lead which was completely squandered by the percussion scores for Flower Mound, a lead that I don't think really should've been possible for Marcus to make up based on the other scoring. Like I have said, I am not at all trying to say I think Flower Mound was better than Marcus, or visa versa, I am purely saying that I think the scoring system was way more detrimental to Flower Mound than it probably should've been.

Obviously I think these are not really new complaints, and I know that they're pretty widely expressed throughout the community. While it does seem like some of these inconsistencies seem to work themselves out in the end to an extent, I just think there's an incredible amount of room for improvement.

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