JUDGING REQUIREMENTS FOR EACH CONGREGATION

1. Each congregation is required to submit a certain number of judges, scorers, or facilitators for a given event based on the number of entrants that they have in an event. Please see the judge registration section that is part of the on-line registration system.  The need to supply judges is not optional.
2. Judges must attend the judge’s meeting late Friday afternoon or Saturday morning, and be at the correct location, ready to judge, 15 minutes before their scheduled judging time. For the sake of the participants, do not sign up a judge who can not meet these requirements.
3. Judges should be intimately familiar with the rules and judging criteria of each event they judge. With the new pre-registration process, we plan to be able to confirm judge placements weeks earlier this year. Questions should be directed to the event coordinator.
4. Judges must not double-schedule time.  If, for instance, they are committed to judge art, they will stay and complete their judging assignment until every work has received a full and fair evaluation.
5. Those persons with the greatest experience in a given event, who have the ability to encourage and not just critique, are the best candidates for judging positions.  All of our young people deserve better than just warm bodies.

JUDGING ETIQUETTE

Every event at LTC requires an adult to make judgments of how a young person’s work meets the standards shown in the event rules.  For all of those who participate as judges, the following concepts must be central to their attitude and comments as judges.

1. The need for every young person to receive positive encouragement to perform to high standards.
2. In order for our youth to improve from one year to the next, judges must give them clear, understandable and positive feedback.  To merely mark a category, “OK,” or “needs improvement” gives a young person no clear direction on how to improve.  Judges must be willing to take the time and make the effort to give this positive feedback.
3. Judges at LTC should not focus on the resources used (elaborate and expensive costumes, for example), but rather on how the youth made use of the resources that they had available to them.
4. The uniqueness of each individual must be taken into account; the question is not, “Is this how I would have done it?” but, “Did this young person meet the standard, or not?”
5. The judge must try to gauge the amount of effort that the youth has put into the work and encourage those who are obviously working very hard to do their best.
6. A true reckoning of the age-adjusted abilities of each youth must be found.  Obviously there would be different standards of performance (in song leading, for example) for a beginning fourth grader, a seventh grader struggling with a changing voice, and a very experienced senior.
7. Judges should not use any judging standard that is not explicitly spelled out in the event rules.  Having “understood” or “hidden” requirements to succeed in an event is unethical and discouraging.
8. Judges should not be biased in their work, and should remove themselves from judging any team or individual whom they cannot judge without such bias (positive or negative).