Overview
Whether you’re studying up and training for your next judging mission or you’re a school looking to educate their pool of drill meet judges – be they adults OR cadets – understanding the mental process by which we arrive at our RANKINGS and RATINGS is fundamental to doing an outstanding job as an evaluator. In this article, we’ll dissect this three (…four?) part process in an easy-to-understand way and practice each step!
If you are training formally to become an Evaluator for Drill-Team Dynamics Inc., you’ll want to submit your practices for feedback!
What IS the Judging Process?
Borrowing heavily from established processes in other like athletic performing arts while infusing our decades-long understanding of the stringent standards and high expectations associated with military D&C, our judging process presently occurs in three steps:
- Impression
- Analysis
- Comparison
As we continue to explore and release both remote/postal and live drill team competitions, a fourth step emerges which will be discussed briefly at the end of this module. Those looking to become Evaluators for the Global Drill Team Challenge or One Nation Under Drill events should familiarize themselves with this final step as well while those who expect to be judging in traditional meet settings should be familiar with the three above for success.
Before we dive into the specifics of each step, let’s get a broad summary of these items from a professional judge in another realm. Julie Davila is a percussion educator with a deep background in judging marching groups of all levels. In this clip, she discusses these three steps very clearly!
Impression
As the name suggests, the first step of the judging process involves forming an initial understanding of the team’s performance level. You’ll want to refer to the DTD RATINGS here because within the first minutes of a team’s performance, we want to make an initial decision about where the team stands in relationship to those criteria.
Establishing your impression is key because it provides the key reference criteria and also informs your likely ROLE & TONE as a judge.
A team that nervously approaches and positions themselves in the ready area of the drill deck, has a cadet commander who seems nervous or unsure of what to do, or who perhaps displays significant timing/precision issues within the first movements they perform is one that is already telling you where you’re likely to triangulate their score. Your impression is would probably be the same as ours: “My initial impression of this team falls in the Developing range.”
Likewise, a team who carries themselves with confidence and bold assuredness, who begins snapping and popping immediately, or who has a cadet commander with great presence is telling you where you should place your impression to the opposite side of the scale. Perhaps, we’re living in higher-level Proficient+ or maybe even Performance-Grade territory.
While forming your initial impression is going to help you frame how you understand, evaluate, and ultimately assign a numerical score to, it’s only the FIRST step and a first impression, as we’re about to discover, may not be a lasting one…
Analysis
In the second step of judging, Analysis, you’ll watch the team closely and use your provided scoresheets to prove or disprove your initial impression of the team.
In order to do this, you must familiarize yourself with the criteria on that scoresheet, understand how you can correlate that particular sheet’s numerical rating system to the DTD Rating framework, and then view the team through this “lens” created for you.
In the Analysis step, you’ll be looking for evidence. If your initial impression of the team placed them in the Developing range, what evidence can we point to, make note of, and score, that justifies this impression. On the flip side, does the team present any evidence that at least portions of their performance have reached beyond the Developing level?
For example, perhaps your initial impression of a team based on their conduct in the ready area and movements up to the report in led you to believe they likely fall in the Developing range. However, after the initial report, the team seems to become more comfortable and begins to display a skill and consistency level beyond that initial impression. Well, we’ve just discovered evidence that perhaps our initial impression should be revisited.
As the team performs, you’ll constantly be asking yourself this question:
“Based on the scoresheets provided by this meet, what is the team doing (or not doing) to provide me evidence of their actual performance level?”
It’s important to note that even if you OVERALL impression of the team falls in one bracket, you should be critically on the lookout for whether any elements of their performance fall into another.
This is key because based on our analysis, we are ready to move into the next stage of judging…
Comparison
Before, we get more specific, let’s again listen to Julie Davila discuss how comparison works at a ten thousand foot level:
Comparison is EXACTLY what it sounds like: using your numerical scores to arrive at your ultimate RANKING of the team! Without impression and analysis, this step can be VERY intimidating. In fact, there are schools of thought presently in circulation that individual judges should not concern themselves with comparison and that the tabulation of their scoresheet will do that for them. We push back on that notion because without comparison, assigning a score becomes a matter of guess-and-check and the teams we’re judging have worked too hard to leave things up to a computer.
Comparison begins when we start to think about the numerical score we’re going to assign to a team in ANY category of our provided scoresheet. Rather than think about ranking the team in front of us against EVERY team we’ll see that day, all we need to do is zero in on the BRACKET of teams who align most closely with the team in front of us in their Impression and Analysis.
For example:
You’ve watched 6 teams perform so far with the 7th finishing up their performance right now. The team you’re judging now falls in the Proficient range based on your Impression and Analysis. Of the 6 teams that performed so far, 4 of them also fell into the Proficient range with 1 of them being at the edge of cresting into Performance-Grade.
In order to provide the best scores to our current team, we can zoom in and see how they compare to these 4 teams. Immediately, we determine that they are not achieving at the same level as the 1 in the higher range of the Proficient rating so we know our scores cannot match or be similar to that group.
This leaves 3 groups to whom we can compare our scores. Perhaps one group scored an 9 out of 20 points in a certain category and another 15. If we determine this team’s performance is between those two in that category, boom, we have a range of numbers we can assign: 10-14 (assuming they’re not equal with either group).
Now, all we need to decide is where that team falls. If they’re close to the lower-scoring team, our number should be closer to that group and vice versa. In this way, we can use our point-spreads (the distance or “gap” between points) to communicate how much stronger or weaker a group was relative to the groups in their immediate bracket.
NOTE: When judging your FIRST team of the day, this step obviously does not apply. In that case, you must rely heavily on your Impression, Analysis, and prior experience in judging to assign your initial scores in the most appropriate, accurate range. We do NOT ascribe to the philosophy that says “start in the middle and then go up or down from there” because in our world, the numbers a team receives are correlated to the DTD Rating framework.
The Final ACTUAL Step – Adjustment
While it is not common practice in most drill competitions, the real last step of judging is Adjustment. Adjustment is the process of the judge retroactively modifying their scores for a given team based on the information they have at present. Common reasons for Adjustment are:
- Multiple teams into the day, the judge has a better idea of the general tenor of the competition and would like to micro-adjust their scoring range by modifying the points awarded to previous teams to more accurately align with the DTD Rating framework. tl;dr – “I gave the first team a score too high into their range to leave room for the multiple other teams who are closely clustered.”
- Multiple teams into the day, the judge wants to better communicate the difference between teams using the points they assign so they adjust their scores in a specific area to reflect the closeness of another team to that team. tl;dr – “After seeing a few more groups, this previous team X is actually closer to previous team Y so I need to adjust X’s score to reflect that more accurately.”
Adjustment is a step that relies on experienced professionals, a schedule/schematic that clarifies when adjustment can occur (perhaps every 5 groups in a schedule of 20 before locking those scores in), and most importantly technology and tools that quickly show a judge the numbers they’ve previously assigned to teams.
Let’s Practice
COMING SOON
This module is part of The Definitive Guide to Judging Drill Meets!